Letters Remain

  • Why We Should Trust Driving Computers

    In light of recent suggestions of technical faults and the ensuing recall of a number of models from Toyota’s line, Robert Wright looks at why we should not worry about driving modern cars.

    The reasons: the increased risks are negligible, the systems that fail undoubtedly save more lives than not, this is the nature of car ‘testing’.

    Our cars are, increasingly, software-driven — that is, they’re doing more and more of the driving.

    And software, as the people at Microsoft or Apple can tell you, is full of surprises. It’s pretty much impossible to anticipate all the bugs in a complex computer program. Hence the reliance on beta testing. […]

    Now, “beta testing” sounds creepy when the process by which testers uncover bugs can involve death. But there are two reasons not to start bemoaning the brave new world we’re entering.

    First, even back before cars were software-driven, beta testing was common. Any car is a system too complex for designers to fully anticipate the upshot for life and limb. Hence decades of non-microchip-related safety recalls.

    Second, the fact that a feature of a car can be fatal isn’t necessarily a persuasive objection to it. […]

    Similarly, those software features that are sure to have unanticipated bugs, including fatal ones, have upsides. Electronic stability control keeps cars from flipping over, and electronic throttle control improves mileage.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Our Reluctance to Trust Driving Computers

    The advanced radar systems that are slowly making their way into modern cars are already advanced enough to drive our cars for us and save thousands of lives a year, says Robert Scoble as he discusses the safety systems currently available in Ford and Toyota models.

    The features Scoble describes (and Ford’s Global Chief Safety Engineer, Steve Kozak, demonstrates in the two embedded videos) are exciting, but it’s this that caught my eye: that according to customer research the general public isn’t ready for the advanced driving systems that already exist.

    There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States — one death every 13 minutes. […]

    Why haven’t they just made my car totally drive itself? Because customers just aren’t ready for it, says Ford’s Kozak in the video. He explains how the 2010 Ford Taurus uses this technology in a much different way from my Prius due to customer research that showed Ford most people just aren’t ready for assisted driving technologies like exist in my Prius.

    I’d love to get my hands on that Ford research.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Improving Intelligence by Knowing About Intelligence

    Lecturing students on the fact that general intelligence can be improved and that certain races and genders are not naturally more intelligent than others (in-line with current research) can improve test scores–especially for members of the groups typically thought of as having limited intelligence.

    It’s not just theoretical: the findings were applied successfully to schools in New York City, showing that “realizing that one’s intelligence may be improved may actually improve one’s intelligence“.

    Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. […]

    Yet social psychologists [have] taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed – a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ’s malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Fertility, Maternal Age and Child Development

    In suggesting alternatives to the status quo of high-status women delaying childbirth further and further, Robin Hanson notes that, unlike advanced paternal age, advanced maternal age does not correlate with poor learning and social outcomes in children (in fact, older mothers had children who scored higher).

    In all cases, we find evidence that children of older mothers have better outcomes. Not only do children born to mothers in their twenties do better than children born to teen mothers, but children born to mothers in their thirties do better than children born to mothers in their twenties. However, when we control for other socioeconomic characteristics, such as family income, parental education and single parenthood, the coefficients on maternal age become small and statistically insignificant. The only exception is an index of social outcomes, which is positively associated with maternal age, even controlling for socioeconomic factors. For cognitive outcomes, young motherhood appears to be a marker, not a cause, of poor child outcomes.

    That may be, but Hanson also states that women drastically underestimate their fertility in later life.

    The average woman is born with around 300,000 eggs […] with just 12 percent of those eggs remaining at the age of 30, and only 3 percent left by 40. […]

    It is clear that there’s a very rapid loss in the number of eggs available as women age and that the smaller pool of [older] eggs is also more likely to contain a higher proportion of abnormal eggs. […]

    It’s important to remember that even 30,000 or so eggs remaining at the start of your 30s is still a lot. In addition, the quantity and quality of eggs are just two factors affecting fertility: […] lifestyle factors such as stress, smoking and being overweight can have an increasingly negative impact on fertility as you get older.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Persuasive Design Patterns

    The Design with Intent toolkit is a guide to help you design systems to influence a user’s behaviour. The author, Dan Lockton, has subtitled the toolkit 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design.

    Categorised into the following eight ‘lenses’ (ways to look at design and behaviour) the toolkit proves to be a fantastic resource for helping you persuade through design.

    • Architectural (e.g. Segmentation and Spacing: Can you divide your system up into parts, so people only use one bit at a time?)
    • Errorproofing (previously) (e.g. Choice Editing: Can you edit the choices presented to users so only the ones ou want them to have are available?)
    • Interaction (e.g. Partial Completion: Can you show that the first stage of a process has been completed already, to give users confidence to do the next?)
    • Ludic (e.g. Unpredictable Rreinforcement: What happens if you give rewards or feedback on an unpredictable schedule, so users keep playing or interacting?)
    • Perceptual (e.g. Fake Affordances: Is there anything to be gained from making something look like it works one way, while actually doing something else (or nothing at all)?)
    • Cognitive (e.g. Social Proof: Can you show people what other users like them are doing in this situation, and which choices are most popular?)
    • Machiavellian (e.g. Anchoring: Can you affect users’ expectations or assumptions by controlling the reference points they have?)
    • Security (e.g. Peerveillance: What happens if users know (or believe) that what they’re doing is visible to their peers also using the system?)

    From the introduction to v0.9 of the toolkit:

    You have a product, service or environment—a system—where users’ behaviour is important to it working properly (safely, efficiently), so ideally you’d like people to use it in a certain way.

    Or maybe you have a system where it would be desirable to alter the way that people use it, to improve things for users, the people around them, or society as a whole.

    How can you modify the design, or redesign the system, to achieve this: to influence, or change users’ behaviour?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Influence of Cognitive Fluency

    We’ve seen before how the cognitive fluency (how ‘easy’ it is to think of or comprehend something) of restaurant menus, stock ticker codes and physical exercises influence how complex, risky and even beautiful we perceive them to be.

    A recent PsyBlog article provides a summary of a number of cognitive fluency studies and here are the ones I’ve not seen before (some of which I wouldn’t have even considered to be related to cognitive fluency):

    • A writer is perceived as having a higher intelligence if his writing is uncomplicated.
    • Non-native residents of a country are thought of more negatively than the natives.
    • Fluent speakers are regarded as being more knowledgeable and intelligent (although it was also found that hesitations in speech cause specific words to be remembered more than others–the word(s) directly following the hesitation).
    • A block of text describing a product can double the amount of people willing to purchase that product if it is written in an easy-to-read font.
    • Physical (sensorimotor) fluency causes pleasure.
    • Cognitive fluency allows us to reason quickly and effortlessly.

    The article concludes with:

    Like mathematicians searching for the shortest formula to describe a complex phenomenon, we should all be obsessed with simplicity, because in simplicity lies beauty and the human mind, as we’ve just seen, finds it difficult to resist.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • A Summary of Happiness Research

    David Brooks brings ‘happiness research’ back to the wider public’s attention with a succinct summary of research into what does and does not make us happy:

    Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow? […]

    If you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

    Brooks goes on to look at the confusing correlations between happiness and wealth before discussing the wider “correspondence between personal relationships and happiness”:

    The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.

    If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

    via Fred Wilson

    I discussed the ‘commuters paradox’ last year, noting that “a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office”.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Marriage as Scope Creep

    Even though married life was progressing well and all involved were happy, Elizabeth Weil decided to actively apply herself to “the project of being a spouse” and to document the process.

    Weil’s article is slow to start but becomes an absorbing inquiry in to what it means to be married.

    I’ve never really believed that you just marry one day at the altar or before a justice of the peace. I believe that you become married — truly married — slowly, over time, through all the road-rage incidents and precolonoscopy enemas, all the small and large moments that you never expected to happen and certainly didn’t plan to endure. But then you do: you endure.

    via Marginal Revolution

    In a similarly absorbing manner, Jonah Lehrer discusses the concept of marriage from a neuropsychological perspective:

    The only problem with this romantic myth is that passion is temporary. It inevitably decays with time. This is not a knock against passion – this is a basic fact of our nervous system. We adapt to our pleasures; we habituate to delight. In other words, the same thing happens to passionate love that happens to Christmas presents. We’re so impossibly happy and then, within a matter of days or weeks or months, we take it all for granted.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Choosing a Marriage Partner

    When you’re looking, here are a few tips on choosing a marriage partner to increase your happiness and marriage longevity, from a summary of the research by Eric Barker:

    • There is mutual idealisation: “Spouses who idealized one another were more in love with each other as newlyweds. Longitudinal analyses suggested that spouses were less likely to suffer declines in love when they idealized one another as newlyweds. Newlywed levels of idealization did not predict divorce.” (Source)
    • Your partner has high self-esteem: On explicit measures of positive illusions, high self-esteem people continue to compensate for costs. However, cost-primed low self-esteem people correct and override their positive implicit sentiments when they have the opportunity to do so. Such corrections put the marriages of low self-esteem people at risk: Failing to compensate for costs predicted declines in satisfaction over a 1-year period. (Source)
    • The male has a high socio-economic status: Previous studies in developed-world populations have found that fathers become more involved with their sons than with their daughters and become more involved with their children if they are of high socioeconomic status (SES) than if they are of low SES. […] High-SES fathers [make] more difference to [their] child’s IQ by their investment than low-SES fathers do. The effects of paternal investment on the IQ and social mobility of sons and daughters were the same. (Source)
    • Your partner is conscientious and slightly neurotic: Conscientiousness [demonstrates] a compensatory effect, such that husbands’ conscientiousness predicted wives’ health outcomes above and beyond wives’ own personality. The same pattern held true for wives’ conscientiousness as a predictor of husbands’ health outcomes. Furthermore, conscientiousness and neuroticism acted synergistically, such that people who scored high for both traits were healthier than others. Finally, we found that the combination of high conscientiousness and high neuroticism was also compensatory, such that the wives of men with this combination of personality traits reported better health than other women. (Source)
    • Avoid ‘cheaters’ by trusting your instincts: The results of these experiments suggest that cheaters might look different from cooperators, possibly due to beliefs and personality traits that make them less ideal exchange partners, and the human mind might be capable of picking up on subtle visual cues that cheaters’ faces give off. (Source)
    • The female is the most attractive partner: Relative difference between partners’ levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives. (Source)
    • The female’s parents are not divorced: Results demonstrated that women’s, but not men’s, parental divorce was associated with lower relationship commitment and lower relationship confidence. These effects persisted when controlling for the influence of recalled interparental conflict and premarital relationship adjustment. The current findings suggest that women whose parents divorced are more likely to enter marriage with relatively lower commitment to, and confidence in, the future of those marriages, potentially raising their risk for divorce. (Source)

    via @charliehoehn

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Behavioural Game Design and the Manipulation of Fun

    Over the last twenty or thirty years gaming has changed almost beyond recognition. With the simultaneous growth in behavioural psychology the two fields have collided, as summarised by Microsoft games researcher John Hopson in his look at behavioural game design.

    Cracked summarises the article well (if not a tad sensationalised) as Five ways video games are trying to get you addicted (part two). It’s worth noting that this is taken from the theories of B. F. Skinner and his operant conditioning chambers (or, Skinner boxes).

    “Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players.”

    Notice his article does not contain the words “fun” or “enjoyment.” That’s not his field. Instead it’s “the pattern of activity you want.”

    His theories are based around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by training subjects with simple stimulus and reward. He invented the “Skinner Box,” a cage containing a small animal that, for instance, presses a lever to get food pellets. Now, I’m not saying this guy at Microsoft sees gamers as a bunch of rats in a Skinner box. I’m just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design using pictures of rats in a Skinner box.

    This sort of thing caused games researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest a “Virtual Skinner Box.”

    So What’s The Problem?

    Gaming has changed. It used to be that once they sold us a $50 game, they didn’t particularly care how long we played. The big thing was making sure we liked it enough to buy the next one. But the industry is moving toward subscription-based games like MMO’s that need the subject to keep playing–and paying–until the sun goes supernova.

    Now, there’s no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner’s techniques.

    This look at how manipulating contingencies in systems and games can obtain desired results/behaviours opens a number of questions. Expect more on this.

    Update: I’ve posted a comprehensive summary of the article in question on micro.Lone Gunman.

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    Lloyd Morgan