Dunning-Kruger effect — "...when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, ...they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine."[6](see also Lake Wobegon effect, and overconfidence effect).
If you didn't catch it in the New Yorker, take some time to read Dangerous Minds
"The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons," Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.'s approach, says. "You've got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he ''t want to see her. It could mean he doesn't want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can't just look at one behavior in isolation."A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.'s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.
Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading," itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the "statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite." ("I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.")
And it continues on, listing more tricks and how they dupe the hopeful. As we all ache for answers, it's good if we remember all the ways we can be fooled as well.
"Our assembly should not be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered."
- Thomas Jefferson
A while back I was reading Working Knowledge in which Davenport wrote "Intuition is compressed knowledge." That phrase stuck with me as a true thing.
Now Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking shows how right-- and how wrong-- that can be. I don't have to tell you to buy it: it's already number two on Amazon's bestsellers list (after the yet-to-be-published Harry Potter book. Someday somebody tell me how that can be so). It's a wonderful exploration of one of my favorite themes, our gut reactions, and definitely a must-buy. While the prose is not quite as elegant as The Tipping Point's, it's still a deftly written and compelling book.
It's got me thinking once again about the care and feeding of our gut. In January's HBR, they reprint Peter Drucker's classic article Managing Oneself (also available in the wonderful collection Harvard Business Review on Managing Your Career) which gives us a hint on how to make that possible...
In this article, Drucker says
"The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations. I have been practicing this method for 15 to 20 years now, and every time I do it, I am surprised. The feedback analysis showed me, for instance — and to my great surprise — that I have an intuitive understanding of technical people, whether they are engineers or accountants or market researchers. "
Although he sees it mainly as a way of getting to know himself, it is also a practice that is changing him. That "intuition" he speaks of is just "compressed experience" reinforced by his tracking practices, and by by tracking each decision, he is training his gut to become smarter and smarter.
Our metaphorical gut is like our real one. Everything we feed our gut makes us who we are. Spinach and steak, one thing. Taco Bell and Coke, another. Hemmingway and Gladwell, one thing. Spiderman and Rose Tremain, another. (before you start screaming, I read all of these).
When I want to improve my writing, the first thing I do is change my reading. When I was younger, I used to write exactly like whomever I was reading. Now my influences are varied enough that I don't unconsciously mimic voice anymore, but I do notice the level of effort rises to the quality of the materials I consume. After a week of reading the New Yorker, I'm using complete sentences once again.
Gladwell talks in Blink about how John Bargh did a set of studies in which people who took tests in which words reinforcing politeness or suggesting old age were embedded. Participants actually had their behavior changed afterwards (to the point that people exposed to old-age words actually walked more slowly, as if they were old). The implications this has on how we care for our guts are eye opening. What price are you paying for a night of American Idol?
As humans, we are naturally adaptable. We can ignore that and let the world have its way with us, or we can harness it and become our best selves.
A Better Social Networking Algorithm
Based on the classsic saying, "The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend" a better SN is proposed...
(thanks Frédéric!)
Persuasive Technology is in turns fascinating and sinister.
This book is a must for any designer working in the technology field. B.J. Fogg is clearly a upright fellow, yet the techniques he offers to persuade desired behavior are so clearly articulated that it is easy to see how they will be used for unethical ends.
Stanford professor Fogg lists many positive uses for these techniques, such as educating teens about domestic violence, or teaching diabetics to monitor their blood sugar levels, or getting RSI sufferers to stretch-- yet it's no effort to image the dark side. A later chapter on ethics does just that, showing his student's experiments in designing unethical tools, such a Pokémon game that coaxes personal information out of children and persuades them to bug their parents for toys.
That said, ignorance is not an option. We need to understand these methods, as designers and as users. I had never seen Amazon' Gold Box as more than a very silly bit of foolishness.. now I understand it for the highly crafted and effective sales tool it is.
Even if persuasion turns you off, you need this book for chapter 7, on web credibility. Check out the website for a taste. Design and information architecture are critical pieces in the struggle to differentiate a site from the vast number of personal sites and imitators sites... an increasingly difficult task for users.
When you finish this book, the hackles on your neck will rise, you'll feel lightly slimey-- but you will be a better designer and a smarter consumer.
Those who deal with metadata, and trying to decide an item's true place in a hierarchy might consider Bachelard's Poetics of Space. It's a lovely (though dense) examination of physical spaces and their associations: how we shape them and then how they shape us. Moreover he looks at those elements that make a thing known as itself: what makes a corner a corner? What is the nature of nest-ness? When is a house a hut?
Sadly the Amazon excerpt doesn't do justice to this book's grace at all, and makes it look more daunting. Be brave and check it out.
The Humane Interface By learning from cognitive science, we can gain a better understanding of how humans think, and build interfaces for them rather than for machines. Many common assumptions are challenged in this terrific and highly accessible book.
Nicholas Paredes writes " I had recently read Abstracting Craft and think it goes really well with "the social life of information" and "interface culture." Many of the to topics are very similar to the social life of information, yet from a perspective which is more psycho than social in the psycho social spectrum. What is craft? how does it apply to computers as tools? how are the senses used? how can interfaces facilitate craft? ...
The Social Life of Information Okay, I haven't read it, but it's a to-do. Decide for yourself. (and if you have read it, please comment on it!)