Letters Remain

  • Six Principles of ‘Sticky’ Ideas

    In an excerpt from Made to Stick, brothers Dan and Chip Heath provide an outline of the six principles of creating ‘sticky’ ideas:

    • Simplicity: “We must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. […] Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.”
    • Unexpectedness: “We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. […] For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. […] We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge — and then filling those gaps.”
    • Concreteness: “We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information.”
    • Credibility: “Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves — a ‘try before you buy’ philosophy for the world of ideas.”
    • Emotions: “How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. […] We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.”
    • Stories: “How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. […] Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.”

    via @contentini

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Near-Far Bias (Construal-Level Theory)

    Robin Hanson has written much over the last few months on ‘construal-level theory‘ (also known as the near-far bias) and I’ve been slowly following along, taking notes.

    The theory, according to Wikipedia, “describes the relation between psychological distance and how abstract an object is represented in someone’s mind. The general idea is that the more distant an object is from the individual the more abstract it will be thought of, while the opposite relation between closeness and concreteness is true as well”.

    In a recent post, Hanson provides a summary of construal-level theory findings and produced this useful image to indicate and compare what lies where on the near-far scale:

    Near-Far Bias Summary from Overcoming Bias

    I can’t help but think how this can be used to persuade others, with both near and far being useful, depending on your specific situation.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Understanding Wisdom

    In a review of Stephen Hall’s Wisdom, Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin asks ‘Can we understand wisdom?’ and looks at the evidence for and against.

    Wisdom is not the same as knowledge, and so it seems odd it has attracted the attention of science. There is such a thing as “wisdom studies” now, and in his book Hall talks to researchers and neuroscientists in a search for the latest information about wisdom. Scientists treat wisdom the way they treat anything else. They break it down into its smallest components to identify and test, and they attempt to figure out how it works, how to obtain it, and what it is. [Hall says:]

    To be wise is not to know particular facts but to know without excessive confidence or excessive cautiousness. Wisdom is thus not a belief, a value, a set of facts, a corpus of knowledge or information in some specialized area, or a set of special abilities or skills. Wisdom is an attitude taken by persons toward the beliefs, values, knowledge, information, abilities, and skills that are held, a tendency to doubt that these are necessarily true or valid and to doubt that they are an exhaustive set of those things that could be known.

    According to Hall and the researchers he has spoken to these are the eight “attributes of wisdom”:

    • Emotional Regulation
    • Knowing What’s Important
    • Moral Reasoning
    • Compassion
    • Humility
    • Altruism
    • Patience
    • Dealing with Uncertainty

    via Intelligent Life

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Facebook’s ‘Like’ and Conspicuous Consumption

    Wondering why we freely and often make our tastes public (specifically, our brand preferences through Facebook’s ‘Like’ mechanism), Nicolas Baumard discusses how we purchase goods to display our good taste:

    In a way, Facebook can be seen as a handy device to send a lot of very precise signals about your opinion and your values! (The average user becomes a fan of four pages every month, according to Facebook). Note that this theory of marketing is just a form of honest signal theory, advocated previously by Veblen in social sciences and Zahavi in evolutionary biology. The difference is that, instead of being focused on the display of wealth, this bourdieusian explanation is interested by other qualities that also need to be adverstised by individuals such as intelligence, social connections, moral disposition, etc.

    To conclude, people may buy razors advertised by Beckham not because they think that these razors made Beckham successful or because they trust Beckham is such matters but because buying a razor linked to Beckham convey a certain message about their distinction.

    I feel that the ‘Like’ functionality is an expense-less method of conspicuous consumption: signalling your likes and brand preferences without having to actually purchase anything (we are saying “I aspire to be the type of person who likes x, y, z” or maybe more accurately “I want you to think I’m the type of person who likes x, y, z”).

    I particularly like the introductory section on how Facebook’s ‘Like’ functionality has doubled brand integration on the site, compared to the old ‘Become a fan’ method. It has apparently reduced the mental barriers (lowered the “threshold”, they say) for users to signal their brand preferences, making sharing easier. And that last bit is key for Facebook.

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Medicine, Specialism, and the Scientific Education

    In the commencement speech he delivered to the graduates of Stanford’s School of Medicine earlier this year, Atul Gawande eloquently (as ever) examined the state of modern medicine (in the U.S. specifically, the world generally), the problem with specialism, and the problem of specialists trying to fit into a system not necessarily designed for it.

    I particularly like Gawande’s analogy on the experience of a scientific education:

    The experience of a medical and scientific education is transformational. It is like moving to a new country. At first, you don’t know the language, let alone the customs and concepts. But then, almost imperceptibly, that changes. Half the words you now routinely use you did not know existed when you started: words like arterial-blood gas, nasogastric tube, microarray, logistic regression, NMDA receptor, velluvial matrix.

    O.K., I made that last one up. But the velluvial matrix sounds like something you should know about, doesn’t it? And that’s the problem. I will let you in on a little secret. You never stop wondering if there is a velluvial matrix you should know about.

    via Intelligent Life

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Technological Timeline and Science Education

    In this brief profile of the Czech-Canadian academic Vaclav Smil–dubbed as Bill Gates’ tutor–we are treated to his thoughts on “the main things we should be worrying about (or not)” from his latest book and his opinion on science education and the maturation timeline of new technologies:

    [Vaclav Smil] is (almost) resigned to the fact that our great debates about energy and the environment are largely pointless, because they are hugely distorted by politics and sadly uninformed by basic facts. We are a culture of scientific ignoramuses. […]

    “We are structurally cooked,” he recently explained. “Every new technology takes 40 to 50 years before it captures the bulk of the market. […] That’s why “we’re going to be a fossil-fuel society for decades to come.” […]

    As someone who was rigorously schooled in all the sciences, he regrets people’s widespread ignorance of science, technology and basic economics. As he told energy writer Robert Bryce, “Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Role of Good Progress Bars

    For the increasingly complex applications that we deal with on a daily basis, progress bars are an important feature in order to provide users with a constant experience of progression, efficiency and engagement.

    After explaining the benefits of progress bars (see above!), Gavin Davies then delves deeper into the topic, looking specifically at the role of progress bars on the Internet.

    Providing good (WGet) and bad (Mac OS8) examples of progress bars and describing the technical problems behind certain types, Gavin defines the four criteria of a good progress bar:

    • Accurate – watching a bar fill up gradually only to chug to a halt at around 90% can infuriate all but the most Zen. Worse still on the hair ripping scale are bars that fill up, only to empty and begin anew!
    • Responsive and smooth – the bar should be updated regularly to show that things are still working. […] Research shows that a linear, consistent progress increase is better than the bar jerking around like a malfunctioning robot dancer.
    • Precise – the bar should show an estimate of time remaining, and perhaps other data such as percent or file size remaining so the user knows if he or she should start any long books in the interim.
    • Appropriate – before using a progress bar, consider carefully whether it is appropriate, both in terms of User Experience and technical feasibility.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Competition Increases Cheating, Not Performance

    By increasing the competitiveness of a task–by rewarding top performers, for example–performance levels do not improve and instead the rate of cheating increases among the worst performers.

    That’s what researchers discovered when they used a maze-based computer task to determine how increasing competitive pressure influences cheating and performance levels.

    Half the students were paid according to how many mazes they completed whereas the half in the ‘highly competitive’ condition were only paid per maze if they were the top performer in their group of six students. […]

    ‘It turns out that individuals who are less able to fulfill the assigned task do not only have a higher probability to cheat, they also cheat in more different ways,’ the researchers said. ‘It appears that poor performers either feel entitled to cheat in a system that does not give them any legitimate opportunities to succeed, or they engage in “face saving” activity to avoid embarrassment for their poor performance.”

    I’m not quite sure of the implications in an academic or professional setting, but I presume they are not great!

    via @TimHarford

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Business of Invention

    By separating invention from manufacture we can create a strong “capital market for inventions”, says former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold*, and this will bring about greater creativity and rewards for all concerned.

    Myhrvold is currently the CEO and cofounder of Intellectual Ventures (a company he freely admits as being “reviled as a patent troll”) and believes that a liquid market for ideas will solve many of the problems that have long plagued inventors and consumers.

    Software owes its ascent largely to two crucial developments. First, software vendors gradually persuaded software users—through both education and lawsuits—to respect intellectual property rights and pay for something that they might otherwise simply copy. Then vendors liberated software from hardware by overcoming system incompatibilities and developing solutions that could work on many different brands of computer. When the PC revolution hit, software became an industry in its own right.

    I believe that invention is set to become the next software: a high-value asset that will serve as the foundation for new business models, liquid markets, and investment strategies. The surprising success Intellectual Ventures has had over the past 10 years convinces me that, like software, the business of invention would function better if it were separated from manufacturing and developed on its own by a strong capital market that funded and monetized inventions.

    To simplify the issue slightly, I feel that the end-product is desirable (an invention market), but the suggested route is less so (separation, ‘education’, lawsuits).

    via @Ando_F

    *Yes, the Nathan Myhrvold of that cookbook.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The World as the Extended Mind

    That the tools and technologies we use act as extensions to our brains is nothing new: this is the extended mind theory. Indeed, last year I pointed to Carl Zimmer arguing that Google–and thus the Internet as a whole–was an extended mind.

    However, Scott Adams’ take on the ‘exobrain’ is simultaneously the most concise and comprehensive I’ve seen:

    I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of manipulating our environment to extend our brains. I suppose it all started with early humans carving on cave walls as a way to store historical data. Now we have ebooks, computers, and cell phones to store our memories. […] Even a house is a device for storing data. Specifically, a house stores data on how it was built. A skilled builder can study a house and build another just like it.

    Everything we create becomes a de facto data storage device and brain accessory. A wall can be a physical storage device for land survey data, it can be a reminder of history, and it can be a trigger of personal memories.

    A business is also a way to store data. As a restaurant owner, I was fascinated at how employees came and went, but their best ideas often stayed with the business, especially in the kitchen. The restaurant was like a giant data filter. The bad ideas were tested and deleted while the good ideas stayed, most often without being written down. […]

    I suppose other creatures use their environment for storing information, or programming their brains in limited ways. But I assume humans export the highest percentage of brain function to their environment, and it grows daily. […] Humans are turning the entire planet into an exobrain. Our brains can’t hold all of the data we produce, so we look for ways to offload to books, websites, music, and architecture, to name a few storage devices. And we manipulate the environment to reprogram our brains as needed.

    via The Browser and Kottke

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    Lloyd Morgan