July 1
2008
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July 6th, 2008 at 9:42 am (#)
Ha, I loved reading that first line.
July 13th, 2008 at 8:41 am (#)
congrats, I especially like the stinger at the end of the rope. it’s all piercing and stingie but like, i wanna reach out and touch it or play with it.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:11 am (#)
That goes along with the whole nerd mentality. I think it’s much more important to get your people skills down before trying to be an engineer. After all, you can laways hire someone to build a system, but you can’t hire someone to relate your vision. Only you can do that. And it requires people skills.
August 13th, 2008 at 10:10 pm (#)
[...] is wading through at least somewhat unfamiliar territory in his LA Times article.) (Hang wrote this great post last week about masquerading as an insider not just by knowing a few facts, but by knowing the [...]
August 14th, 2008 at 7:25 am (#)
[...] is wading through at least somewhat unfamiliar territory in his LA Times article.) (Hang wrote this great post last week about masquerading as an insider not just by knowing a few facts, but by knowing the [...]
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm (#)
[...] Bumblebee Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Universal undo Good Idea, this is why I find I use intellij idea as my text editor and go through the hassle of creating a project and the like. Having the ability to roll back any changes made right up to the start is well, liberating. (tags: ux) [...]
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:59 am (#)
I had a good chuckle envisioning a container ship parked in the driveway. But thinking about this stuff is good. Truckers get the produce, even long haul, because they deliver on time, unlike the railroads. For some foods — such as lobsters flown around the planet — local is plainly sensible. For durable cargo — canned delicacies or drums of olive oil — the container ship can work. Anyway these gallon per ton-mile calculations are tricky, since every truck, train route, and container ship is different, and their averages might overlap a good deal. http://www.lafn.org/~dave/trans/energy/rail_vs_truckEE.html has a nice start.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:28 pm (#)
“For most people, that means buying as much of your food as possible from farmers markets.”
Really? For me, when in the Whole Foods (for example) grocery section it is as simple as looking at where the food came from. They label it pretty clearly and emphasize locally sourced produce.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:27 am (#)
How far is the nearest Whole Foods from your house? How far is the nearest supermarket? (In my case, the Whole Foods is half as far away, 3 blocks vs 6 blocks but I’m an exception). There’s only 3 Whole Foods in Seattle as far as I recall, If you don’t live close to one of those then driving the 10 miles to get there pretty much eliminates the carbon savings from buying local.
October 16th, 2008 at 7:36 am (#)
Nice blog since I’m also one interested in philosophy and statistics
Can you recommend any nice literature on statistics? Most are focusing too much
on methods.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:39 am (#)
I think you would love E.T.Jaynes’ book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. On the controversy between Frequentists and Bayesians, Jaynes take a 100% Bayesian view and takes up the challenge of fully explaining the philosophy behind his position.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:48 pm (#)
You know, that result (women see community around porn exists while men do not) doesn’t actually surprise me, particularly based on the women I know..
It’s not a conversation I have often, but several of my female friends in NZ have told me that they actively contribute to pornographic short fiction communities, and say they find it to be outlet that’s liberating in a way unlike any other. Sure, that’s anecdotal, but I think there probably is some general difference between men and women here about openness and willingness to discuss sexual activity. I bet there’s research out there that backs this up, too..
Also, I’d be interested to hear you talk about your ideas regarding commenting systems some time, too..
October 25th, 2008 at 11:35 am (#)
OK, this posting is offensive.
I was at the talk yesterday, and the topic of online porn communities was a small part of the overall conversation. My colleagues (who are not “girls” btw) made some insightful comments on one aspect of web communities–to say “everyone seemed to get really attached to the porn thing” is a gross mischaracterization of the discussion. Now, if you want to raise the issue of porn communities on your blog, you should own it yourself–not by characterizing the women in the room as purveyors of porn. Moreover, if you saw the men in the room as sitting back and wanting the conversation to end then you clearly were not listening to us.
BTW, you misspelled the word “skeptical.”
October 25th, 2008 at 8:56 pm (#)
John: It was indeed a very small part of the discussion but it was the most memorable part for me, just because it came so far out of left field. I was not casting any value judgments on anyone in the room, we were all adults and I think the discussion around porn was mostly done from a value neutral context. I thought it was worth blogging about for two reasons:
One was the interesting sociological observation that, at least within that room, there was a clear gender divide on opinions of whether porn communities were a large part of porn. I actually made this observation during the talk and I don’t remember anyone challenging me on it. I don’t think I was in any way characterizing women as purveyors of porn and I don’t see where you got that insinuation from. My personal explanation (which I was not prepared to justify in a professional context and so therefore kept to myself) was that in modern society, for a female to be really into porn is considered sexy and liberating and enlightened whereas for a guy to be really into porn is considered misanthropic and obsessive.
Two was that I just wanted to share some of the bizarre inner monologue that passes through my head every day. If you believe that this is aberrant or abnormal behavior, well… you know the site to go to.
I’m sorry that you found this post offensive but I stand by everything I say with the exception of calling them “girls”. I’ve edited the post to reflect that.
BTW: sceptical is the British spelling of the word. I’ve been slowing shifting my spelling to standard, American English but force of habit established via 18 years of living in Australia can be hard to break.
October 29th, 2008 at 10:36 pm (#)
You are invoking occam’s razor, aka the principle of parsimony.
i think it’s the root of all philosophy: when throw out all your assumptions about how to explain your observations of the world, the most basic assertion you’re left with is that the simplest explanation is probably correct.
for instance, suppose someone argues that a physical object you see like your hands doesn’t exist and is actually a figment of your imagination. then how do you explain all the other hands in the world? why don’t you have hands? why is your imagination different than everyone else’s? or why is everyone making up this idea of hands? how do people move objects? isn’t it simpler to just believe in hands?
occam’s razor doesn’t prove that god doesn’t exist, but it lets you argue that unless god is the simplest explanation for your world, you shouldn’t believe in god cause you’ll probably be wrong and you’re wasting your time thinking about him.
October 29th, 2008 at 10:51 pm (#)
I have an invisible pink dragon in my garage. Now prove it does not exist.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:24 am (#)
See, your argument gives me (good) reasons not to believe in god (which I don’t), but it doesn’t _prove_ that god doesn’t exist. Neither, for that matter, does Occam’s Razor _prove_ that a more complex explanation of some phenomena is not true. In both cases, it merely provides (strong) evidence that the simple explanation should be accepted first.
You _may_ have proved that believers are statistically irrational (Occam’s Razor being, after all, a statistical argument), but you’ve not proved non-existence. It’s easy to claim ‘non-evidence’, but an extra step is required to take that on to non-existence.
Of course, for almost all practical purposes, non-evidence may as well be proof of non-existence – you don’t need to prove the non-existence of the Easter bunny, or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster, after all. Why should the Judeo-Christian God be any different. I’m only disagreeing with the purely abstract claim you made, not its implications..
October 30th, 2008 at 2:15 am (#)
Yes, I’m building on a long precedent. The problem is, occam’s razor is true but it doesn’t work as an explanation, I’ve tried it. Occam’s razor is a powerful tool for people who accept it but it’s incredibly non-intuitive for those who are new to it. I’m hoping that this reframes the problem into one which makes intuitive sense to people.
October 30th, 2008 at 3:08 am (#)
Here’s the difference between this and Occam’s razor. There are really at least two distinct reasons why theists have such a hard time understanding why atheism is even an intellectually credible position.
One is that they disagree from a fundamentally philosophical standpoint. They might accept that supernatural events are not obviously manifest and that God only reveals himself to those willing to make the leap of faith. They accept only balls >100 are drawn but that the evidence for God lies somewhere else: in the human quest for meaning or the structure and order of life. In which case, the urn example lays explicit the areas of agreement and disagreement. In which case, Occam’s Razor is a valid counterargument and you can then move forward from there.
The other is that they simply disagree with you on a factual level. To them, faith healing is real and demons have a manifest effect on the world. Miracles happen all the time and you would have to be *stupid* and *blind* to be an atheist. To them, it’s so obvious that supernatural events are happening that they never even consider that another person could view the world differently. What this example demonstrates is that yes, atheists too would be convinced by supernatural events. A ball with the number 417 would convince an atheist the urn is red just as easily as a bona fide miracle would convince them of God’s existence. The point of contention is on an interpretation of evidence, not philosophy and you can go into why the ball they think looks like a 417 actually looks like a 17 to you and thus, completely comfortably fitting into the green urn.
If you differ on a factual level, then Occam’s Razor is completely a non convincing argument. If miracles are happening on a daily basis, then the simplest explaination really is that god exists.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:43 am (#)
This is missing the point entirely. From a strict logic standpoint: It is IMPOSSIBLE to prove a negative. End of discussion.
You cannot prove God does not exist. Nor, does the atheist have to. The atheist is not making a positive claim. The theist is making the claim, therefore the theist has to prove that God DOES, in fact, exist. To date, there has been no valid proof of God’s existence. (I would add, “that I know of,” except for the fact that if there WAS a valid proof of God’s existence put forward at some point in the past, no one would be arguing the point.)
October 30th, 2008 at 7:14 pm (#)
Existence, with an ‘e’.
October 31st, 2008 at 7:11 am (#)
PDtryder said: From a strict logic standpoint: It is IMPOSSIBLE to prove a negative. End of discussion.
I read this a lot. The claim is false, however, in general.
For example, I can prove a negative any time that the negative can be proved by examining a finite number of cases, simply by examining all of them.
So “No coins exist inside my pocket” is a negative, which can be proven by checking my pocket for coins. So, from a logic standpoint, the claim that proofs of negatives are impossible is false.
October 31st, 2008 at 7:13 am (#)
Apologies for the typo in your name there PStryder
October 31st, 2008 at 1:27 pm (#)
“Atheists don’t have an argumentation problem, they have a communication problem.”
Agreed.
But, I’m not convinced that improved communication would actually solve the problem, partly for the reason you outline in your last paragraph – argument itself (you know, marshaling evidence & logic) is the thing that’s troubling for a lot of people – it leaves out the privileged role they afford their own emotions (not to mention they find it insulting and condescending). It’s not that atheists fail to argue well (though some do), or even communicate well (though some do), but that arguing atheists fail to affect those people who aren’t willing to allow argument to undermine their identity and emotional beliefs.
That willingness to question oneself and accept that one’s own beliefs and perceptions might be wrong isn’t universal, and might even be detrimental to some people’s happiness. And, that willingness can’t be changed by argument (because of itself) , so it seems to me that, before atheistic arguments can work, that person must make the first few steps on their own.
So, I don’t usually bother arguing atheism with true believers, but only with doubters, atheists, and philosophers who are interested – otherwise I’m just irritating people. That said, I do take a guilty pleasure in asking difficult questions when opportunity knocks..
As regards your previous post – you framed your point as an argument of proof, which it wasn’t. The logic geek in me seethes every time I leave such things alone. It seemed a bit weird to me that you were claiming it as such, but, well, you said it anyway
It seems to me that there’s no practical difference between philosophical agnostics (who assign a probability of almost zero to God), and soft atheists (who accept the overwhelming evidence as tantamount to proof). It’s like calculus – my belief in god(s) tends towards zero, yours is zero – a difference only worth talking about with mathematicians or philosophers. Given that, then, it amuses me that some atheists spend a lot of time bashing agnostics, and, possibly vice versa..
October 31st, 2008 at 2:14 pm (#)
I have a flatmate L— who’s an actor, and was recently called upon to play Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. The “Queen Mab” scene in the play required him to act drunk – and he’s never been drunk in his life.
Watching his performance, I think he did it quite convincingly. Our other flatmate S— has a tendency to get happily drunk when he can, so L— channelled those observations into the performance. As you noted, the convincing nuance was not in the slur and the sway, but in acting the correction for it when you do.
One thing that annoys me here in New Zealand is actors trying to play Americans. Most people ham it up horrendously based on a stereotypical American (of whichever type – anything from redneck yokel to New York cabbie), despite seeing a lot of Americans all the time on television.
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:13 am (#)
[...] lines are relatively similar regardless of whether the debate is about music piracy, biofuels, strong encryption, ad blocking software, transhumanism or biotechnology. The obvious missing [...]
November 5th, 2008 at 1:40 am (#)
[...] shows a remarkable amount of inside knowledge of CS culture. In other words, Barack Obama knew how the two facts and one joke. It may seem a small thing to know but in order to have been in a position to give such a reply so [...]
November 5th, 2008 at 2:48 am (#)
hey dude, you missed a post! That means you owe me a beer haha — http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/?p=181
November 5th, 2008 at 5:05 pm (#)
So, the other half of this is being left out. How are the goods that are being shipped half-way around the world getting to that giant container ship? Is it by efficient rail, or subsidized sulfur rich diesel and nasty-ass old trucks.
The farmer’s market may be rattling old trucks, but if we ge tthe food there, (and it’s close to home) then we save the distance travelled to port and from the sea-ports. but once it is too port, then the fuel costs are comparable.
It also matters how the food is grown. Apples in new Zealand aren’t irrigated. Apples in Washington are heavily irrigated either by diesel pumps or electric salmon killing/coal burning pumps. There is probably a much smaller carbon footprint on the NZ Apples than the American ones.
Unless you count Washington orchards in the desert as a carbon sink, then who knows?
November 6th, 2008 at 8:51 pm (#)
I’m the 3rd type
thanks for writing this.
November 9th, 2008 at 3:28 pm (#)
Hang,
I came across your blog today and plan to revisit it soon to finish reading your 30 days of posts. You certainly have spend some serious time thinking about things related to HCI and emerging technologies.
It is refreshing to see your perspective on things. You have realized that technology is merely a tool to support the bigger picture. People. Ideas. Memories.Feelings. Actions. Transactions. Understanding.Community. Sense of Self….Life.
(At mid-life, I decided to take computer courses part-time and went on to take some graduate-level HCI -related courses, having spent most of my adult life as a school psychologist. I’m interested in collaborative technologies, emerging technologies, and off-the desktop applications.)
November 9th, 2008 at 6:03 pm (#)
Hi Lynn,
Thanks for the kind words. Can I ask how you found this blog?
Cheers
Hang
November 9th, 2008 at 6:05 pm (#)
For the “local” produce in your supermarket, do you know if it’s being shipped by rail or nasty old trucks? The variations should all come out in the wash. Regardless of anything else, the point of this post was that other, unconsidered factors dwarf “food miles” in consideration when comparing the ultimate environmental impact of your diet.
November 9th, 2008 at 11:15 pm (#)
One more very useful zero-knowledge proof along the same lines: How bad are the opponents’ arguments? This is particularly useful in political situations where there’s a group on the other side with plenty of resources to attack a case. If they’ve had to resort to misleading use of statistics and logic that doesn’t stand up to a bit of thought, there’s a good chance that the case they’re attacking is sound.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:37 am (#)
[...] a result, economists have developed a simple zero knowledge proof: At the first obvious sign that the other person is not a complete insider of economics, stop [...]
November 10th, 2008 at 12:38 pm (#)
Interesting – it seems trivially obvious, now having read your post, that the Kuhnian idea of changing scientific paradigms is applicable to economics like this, but I’ve never really thought of it that way.
I wonder – economics, because it’s so widely practiced and laced into our political lives, seems to have more of a ‘folk’ or social component than other sciences. I’m not sure that this will affect paradigm shift in academic economics, but I wonder how long it will take for main-stream uptake of those changing ideas.. That is, how much longer will folk economists take to change, and what effect does that delay have?
Either way, thought provoking.
November 10th, 2008 at 7:19 pm (#)
That’s an interesting question. It seems folk economics is driven more than ideology than theory and what I foresee happening is that the Libertarian ideology becoming increasingly more discredited and people from the Socially Liberal ideology selectively taking pieces of evidence from Economics and using it to strengthen their world view.
One thing I think would be an easy win for the socially liberal is an economically justifiable version of a luxury tax on the basis that happiness depends more on relative wealth than absolute wealth.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:04 pm (#)
[...] I wrote about the mystery of why spam was so bad at being spam and I claimed that it was a mystery that seemingly defied explanation. None of what I proposed as [...]
November 16th, 2008 at 11:43 am (#)
You’re an asshole. Learn to read!
November 18th, 2008 at 6:57 pm (#)
some of them are implemented with cookies that expire when your browser quits
November 19th, 2008 at 7:42 pm (#)
i actually subscribed to arstechnica for a couple of months, but then it started to bother me that i couldn’t whitelist the website, i would really like to be able to donate and not only get the premium content but also a less crapfilled experiance (try no-script at their site).
November 20th, 2008 at 10:02 am (#)
Here here!
November 23rd, 2008 at 5:45 am (#)
Here’s what I hear from folks who’ve been online a long time and tried Drudge but can’t stick with him: His design is too confusing. You can’t tell what’s news. (Granted, you have to get used to his odd style.) Things are just thrown up there and you don’t have a clue what he’s talking about or referring to (again, these are the folks who aren’t die-hard newsies and don’t already know his style).
Then there are the college kids and folks who have grown up with the Internet these past 15 years while Drudge’s page has remained stuck in time. They say the thing looks utterly bizarre. Don’t understand who would use such a hideous layout (and for that matter, say they don’t “get” why Drudge is a big deal or ever was, all he does is link to other news publications. Again, you’d have had to have been there when Drudge broke on the scene to get it.).
December 6th, 2008 at 3:37 am (#)
[...] explainations of infeasibility on a certain degree of faith and deferrel to expert opinion, we use zero knowledge rather than first order [...]
December 9th, 2008 at 3:40 pm (#)
save to my Bookmarks )
December 16th, 2008 at 3:43 pm (#)
Great report and my sentiments exactly.
Here at eCommerce Report we’ve been crying out for recognition of this state of affairs for some time. Indeed earlier this year typing http://www.myers.com.au into a browser produced a page inviting log-in their Apache server.
(See my story at http://www.safeways.net.au).
BTW, I arrived here via a Google Alert for Australian ecommerce. Its amazing how quickly Google’s Alert service picks up anything published in a new Word Press blog
December 19th, 2008 at 8:06 pm (#)
Excellent web pages Successes and prosperity to you!
December 19th, 2008 at 11:42 pm (#)
[...] Cross-posted from the blog Figuring Shit Out [...]
December 20th, 2008 at 1:40 am (#)
Well put. I agree.
I took me until a significant number of years into my life before I even began to think about religion and then not until within the last several years that come to any sort of a conclusion as to what I believe.
Considering the alternate argument and effort required to explain an alternate “default” such as animist intuition, it is all too easy and understandable why in many cases arguing “everyone is born atheist” is an more likely assumption to come to consensus on.
December 20th, 2008 at 9:09 am (#)
Saying that everyone’s born an atheist suggests that everyone starts with the concept of what a god is, and believes they don’t exist. That’s patently silly. “No-one is born a theist” would be less so, though.
I like the idea that everyone is born a storyteller. A good part of human learning is coming up with ideas (by induction or deduction) and casting them out into the world we perceive to see if they stick. Regardless of whether our theories have gods or spirits in them or not, we’re essentially trying to tell ourselves and each other stories about the world that help it make sense to us. Both science and religion do that – albeit in different ways, at different levels and to different intentions.
December 20th, 2008 at 3:09 pm (#)
Good post.
I think you’re assigning more meaning to the word ‘atheism’ than you should though. Atheism is simply the lack of belief in a deity, nothing more. This includes anyone from a guy like Dawkins, to a newborn baby, since both don’t have a belief in a god. You can’t imply that atheism is some sort of intellectual exercise that rids the individual of theism and allows them to think clearly, since the person’s ability to do this has nothing to do with their atheism.
I don’t think it’s anyone’s ‘atheism’ that challenges our animist intuition, but rather our desire for knowledge. Just as we evolved to interpret our world through animism, maybe we’re taking the ‘next step’ through scientific inquiry and intellectual discourse to find out more about our world.
I just don’t see how we can ascribe atheism to someone’s reason for doing anything, since it’s nothing more than a lack of belief in god. If you’re dealing with the term solely based on its definition, everyone is born without belief in god, as you have to be introduced to a god to believe in one.
December 20th, 2008 at 3:29 pm (#)
It’s all semantics really–which is why this topic has caused so much confusion–but purely based on definition, we are all born without the belief in god which makes us atheists technically. We’re also aunicornists, atoothfairyists, etc.
But this is exactly why I don’t like labels anyway. They don’t accomplish much in the end.
December 21st, 2008 at 12:51 am (#)
[...] of the reactions to my most recent post that “No one is born atheist” contain some variant of the argument: Since atheism is defined as the lack of belief in a [...]
December 21st, 2008 at 12:52 am (#)
Hi Zaki,
I’ve responded to your comments here: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/what-atheism-isnt
December 21st, 2008 at 12:56 am (#)
[...] Cross-posted from the blog Figuring Shit Out [...]
December 21st, 2008 at 1:30 am (#)
I think on several occasions, you could replace ‘atheist’ with the term ‘critical thinker’ and it would make more sense.
It’s not someone’s ‘atheism’ that causes them to reject a given belief claim, but rather their ability to think critically and examine evidence. Atheism is not a belief, set of beliefs, state of mind, way of thinking, etc etc etc. It is a rejection of a specific belief claim that a god exists, based either on the person’s ability to think critically, or it could even be based on the person’s outright ignorance.
Do you realize that some people are actually atheists because they are just too ignorant and/or lazy to even deal with the issue of theism? By definition, they are atheists because they do not believe in god, but these people are by no stretch of the imagination free thinkers or intellectuals in any sense of the word. I would think associating yourself with these types of people does you no more good than the people you are trying to distance yourself from with your other post.
I just think that if we must label these people you’re talking about, it would better serve you to call them free thinkers, rather than atheists. Atheists come in all ranges of intellect and philosophical interest, but we can at least say with more certainty that free thinkers are the ones that actively challenge our animist intuitions.
Your whole point of saying no one is born an atheist is because you think it does the word ‘atheist’ a disservice since you say it is our atheism that serves to challenge our natural animist instincts. I’m suggesting that it’s not our ‘atheism’ that does this but rather our ability to think critically, which only LEADS to our atheism, but it has nothing to do with our atheism to begin with.
Atheism is not what makes someone think a certain way, but rather the result of an intellectual inquiry (or, as I said, in some cases outright ignorance).
Not everyone is born a free thinker, and I think this is more to your point. I just think you’re incorrectly equating free thinker with atheist, when they are not necessarily synonyms. As I have pointed out, one can certainly be an atheist, but not a critical thinker at the same time. I think based solely on definition, we are in fact all born without the belief in god…the same way we were born without the belief in santa claus…..but we’re not all born with the ability to think critically.
Again, this is why I tend to stay away from labels because they cause this kind of confusion were everyone starts attributing their own meaning to each label. Atheism is nothing more and nothing less than non-belief in a diety.
I personally don’t think it does the word atheism a disservice to suggest that everyone is born one. I happen to think you’re ascribing your own definition to the word, which is why you’re drawing the conclusions you are, but based purely on its definition of lack of belief in god, we are in fact all born without that belief in god.
December 21st, 2008 at 2:36 am (#)
Zaki: You’re right that labels are the source of much confusion which is why we need to take care when using them.
“Do you realize that some people are actually atheists because they are just too ignorant and/or lazy to even deal with the issue of theism?”
I prefer to call these people apathists.
My distinction between the multiple forms that non-belief can take was designed to highlight why the statement “Everyone is born an atheist” is such a poor argument from a logical perspective. It deliberately conflates two different forms of non-belief which should be kept quite distinct.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:05 am (#)
I see exactly what you’re saying. I see your conflict as one between the varying degrees of ‘atheist’. Within that group of people that don’t believe in god, you have those that (as you call) are apatheists, some that are anti-theists, some that are agnostic atheists, and so on. I see where people would have an issue with the term atheist, which is why I have actually started recently to substitute it with the more plain-speak term ‘non-believer’. And when you use it in that sense, I would hope you could agree that everyone is born a non-believer in not only a god, but also a non-believer in anything else, since you either have to conjure up a belief on your own or be introduced to it, and a newborn child can do neither.
December 21st, 2008 at 7:06 am (#)
Thank you! I’ve been dealing with this confusion (people not understand what atheism is and isn’t) on my blog for a while. Your closing statement is probably one of the best summary statements I’ve found. Thank you!
December 21st, 2008 at 7:23 am (#)
[...] over at Figuring Shit Out (what a cool blog title, huh?) writes an interest post on What Atheism [...]
December 21st, 2008 at 10:15 pm (#)
I think the following is just false: “It is not enough to claim that gods do not exist to become atheist, you must also provide a explanation that explains the evidence for the existence of gods.”
Imagine an unthinking person brainwashed by atheist parents into being a doctrinaire atheist, and who is unable to provide an explanation for any of the things you mention. Evidently your view is that this person is not an atheist. But obviously they are.
In short, you seem to be confusing (i) what it actually takes to count as an ‘atheist’, with (ii) your ideal image of what an atheist should be like.
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 am (#)
Dave2,
“In short, you seem to be confusing (i) what it actually takes to count as an ‘atheist’, with (ii) your ideal image of what an atheist should be like.”
I wholeheartedly agree and think that’s exactly what’s going on.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:18 am (#)
[...] your phone comes out of the jailbreak at the apple boot logo screen and continually restarts, see this post for a [...]
January 2nd, 2009 at 8:48 pm (#)
Hi.
I was born an atheist. Then I heard about all the claims for the existence of God. I studied religion, science, and philosophy.
I am still an atheist.
Thank you.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:38 pm (#)
[...] just ran across an article by the now departed Michael Crichton on an excellent example of a skill you didn’t know you needed. Here’s what I don’t understand. If you were going to spend your life in physical [...]
January 8th, 2009 at 12:54 pm (#)
Well done on an extremely lucid contrast of the two types of ideas.
It drives me crazy that your solution for how to distinguish between the two is that it’s impossible. Even if someone were to “reach the cliff”, for any cargo cult idea of significance one man’s assertions would be quickly covered up by those who have lived their lives in support of the false idea.
You mention “only probabilistic measures are possible” but I a having a hard time conceptualizing for what sort of circumstances you could argue disproving the cargo cult idea is “possible”. Or maybe you just mean possible on a one-on-one basis.
How frustrating.
Do you have other examples of good cargo cult ideas that exist similarly to the atheist vs. christian argument?
January 10th, 2009 at 8:14 am (#)
Hi Zach,
This is in my sketches blog which means it’s still a work in progress…
It’s impossible to distinguish the two with an absolute degree of certainty but it’s often fairly easy to get 90% of the way there. It’s impossible to ever ascertain certainty because simply disproving one version of an idea doesn’t mean there doesn’t exist a more sophisticated version which is immune to your disproof and proving that your idea survives an argument doesn’t mean there’s a more sophisticated argument that punctures it.
I’m going to expand on this piece in a little bit…
January 11th, 2009 at 11:46 am (#)
[...] I stepped on this page that explains a possible solution that actually works! In some way it makes sense in some other [...]
January 13th, 2009 at 3:07 pm (#)
I’d agree except do you _really_ want to be clicking the dialog all the time saying it’s okay the app uses the location services?
January 13th, 2009 at 3:38 pm (#)
Love it – just started covering web design and publishing and this blog post goes hand-in-hand with our first week discussions. It’s a shame I didn’t catch up with this post until today, it would have done my homework for me last night.
January 13th, 2009 at 8:25 pm (#)
I use a little piece of software called WinFF for this – you just queue up a bunch of video files in it, and it rapidly spits out a bunch of MP3s. Since it tends to take me a while to get from downloading something to looking at it, I tend to do them in batches, which makes it nice and practical..
I’ve never been good at listening to things during game playing, though – though I guess it depends on the type of game I’m playing..
January 13th, 2009 at 10:14 pm (#)
I used to do this using something like mediacoder but for me, the lag was often a month or two and it became too annoying to deal with. If you only want to listen to the audio without doing anything else on the iPhone, do this:
Start the video playing
Press the power button
Press it again
Hit the home button twice
click play
Press the power button again
This way, you can get the video playing with the screen off.
January 13th, 2009 at 10:17 pm (#)
True, I still haven’t figured out the correct mental model for the GPS dialog. The default camera app uses GPS but it seems to save your preference for some period of time…
January 16th, 2009 at 12:30 am (#)
Erlang has first class functions. (It did not always. So if it was 10 years ago you looked at it, you’re excused
lists:map(fun(X) -> X*X end, [1,2,3])
or
lists:map(fun square/1, [1,2,3])
square(X) -> X * X.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:36 pm (#)
Oh, nice. The last time I looked was in 2004 so… 5 years ago.
January 18th, 2009 at 10:13 am (#)
other choices are fine languages but I think you will wind up with serious regrets for some practical reasons. Python suits your criteria very well and is a sound, pragmatic choice.
Besides, Python is just plain fun. You owe it to yourself to experience the joy of programming in Python.
January 18th, 2009 at 10:41 am (#)
Unrelated, but the light gray on black style is extremely difficult to read.
January 18th, 2009 at 10:26 pm (#)
Actually, it’s gray (#777777) on dark gray, not black.
I’ll show a screenshot to my co-workers. They need a laugh.
January 19th, 2009 at 4:49 am (#)
I’m aware of the design deficiencies of the blog
. I’m working on a rollout of a new version that should be much more aesthetically pleasing and feature some neat enhancements I’ve been planning for a while.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:44 pm (#)
“it’s actually quite surprising just how prevalent and casual privacy violation can be yet it’s not talked about nearly as much.”
What do you mean here by privacy violation? How does this occur?
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:52 am (#)
Ex girlfriends using their friends’ profiles to check up on what their ex boyfriend is doing would be one example.
January 24th, 2009 at 11:31 am (#)
Phenomenal post, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
January 28th, 2009 at 7:40 am (#)
A bit late, but… “The Mismeasure of Man” by Stephen Jay Gould is a very illuminating read about the misuse of statistics.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:05 am (#)
As an operator for both Pierce Transit and Sound Transit I found this to be quite humorus. While the new Pierce Transit paint sceme is better than the old, it still leaves a lot to be desired. The most common comment I get is how the sceme makes the coach look like its frowning when looking at the front.
As for the pink lights, we fought hard and long for those. The pink lights dramaticly cut down on internal glare on the windshield. With white lights the glare can make it almost impossible to see, most notably when its raining. Even tough the front lights go out when the doors are closed, the lights behind those still caused problems. Pierce Transit and the operators agreed that its pretty important. Even though most riders don’t care for the pink lights, I think they would agree as well, that seeing whats going on outside the coach is a good thing.
January 31st, 2009 at 5:08 am (#)
[...] few months ago, I wrote about a better way of serving ads by replacing the ad with a donate button. A recent Wall Street Journal article reports that wikiHow [...]
February 6th, 2009 at 2:52 am (#)
Adding this to my bookmarks. Thank You
February 7th, 2009 at 5:29 am (#)
Why aren’t you using DataMapper?
It’s specifically designed to be stand alone, and covers all of the things that you’ve listed there.
I’ve used DM for several strictly data related tasks that range from mocking up new app model structures, or to provide access to existing databases, and a lot more.
And there aren’t any dependencies on a web application framework
The syntax is negligibly different, and if you can get over the few best practice type things that DataMapperers dissuade (like STI, which they finally have relented on) then DM will do you fine.
February 7th, 2009 at 6:04 am (#)
Ted, that’s a good point, I’ll check out data mapper.
February 13th, 2009 at 7:36 am (#)
[...] Cross-posted from the blog Figuring Shit Out [...]
February 13th, 2009 at 7:59 am (#)
Good stuff Hang. I thought about writing something on the whole issue of “why”, but I just never got around to it. I tend to think religion necessitates an explanation of “why”, even more than our natural curiosity. In other words, I think atheists that have never been religious aren’t really concerned with the why’s of things. Religion gives you a why, and for a lot of religious folks, for them to leave their religion, they have to have a secular “why” to replace their religious one. If they can’t find a secular “why” they don’t see the worth of non-belief. But if they hadn’t been given this fake explanation of “why” from their religion, they wouldn’t have this crutch in the first place.
February 14th, 2009 at 1:05 pm (#)
G’day Hang…
I think it is true that a believe in a god that intervenes into the process of evolutino is more or less equivalent to just believing in creationism, it would just mean that god is doing it the long way rather than in one go.
However, i think an interesting point is the differentiation between WHY and HOW questions. Science can strictly spoken by its nature never answer questions that start with WHY. For example, the laws of gravity do not explain why things fall, they just allow to predict on which trajectory they will fall. Why is there such thing as gravity and why does it act this way and not in another way remains a religious question – forever, definitely!
The same applies to the mechanism of evolution – we can understand better and better how mutations arise etc, but that just means getting a handle on the laws of nature. You can alwys ask “why are these laws this way and not different?”. And the laws of nature that govern our universe plus the initial conditinos given at some early time (which by the way are also not accessible to science) more or less determine the outcome of evolution (maybe modulo some quantum uncertainty).
On top of that, there are far from being understood, e.g. the appearance of what one usually cals consciesness. A lot of moderate people claim that god only intervenes by giving his creatures “ideas”. Given the poor understannding of the connectino between mind and matter it seems currentlyimpossible to rule out such ideas.
Finally, if god is not to be understood in the framework of space and time, one could argue that he created the world as one fourdimensjional entity, even though that leads to big trouble with the concept of free will.
Interesting topic anyways….
February 20th, 2009 at 7:26 am (#)
[...] some digging I found some infos on apps blocking correct jaiilbreaking, meaning that you [...]
February 22nd, 2009 at 6:45 am (#)
[...] – bookmarked by 2 members originally found by waylan on 2009-02-01 The state of Academic HCI http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/?p=301 – bookmarked by 3 members originally found by ZanyBear on [...]
February 25th, 2009 at 3:52 am (#)
Children are born without the knowledge of there being a god, they do not judge that there is catagorically no god, as atheism does, nor do they have the capeability to know whether or not there is god. At best children are born agnostic, but they are not born thinking god does not exist.
February 28th, 2009 at 11:40 am (#)
What about me? I was never animistic or superstitious even as a child. I always assumed those stories told by adults at sunday school and parents were part of some unspoken game. I was six when I realized they actually believed them. It really creeped me out. After long talk with my father he allowed me to stay home. Both parents were non-denominational christians, so I must have taken them by suprise.
March 4th, 2009 at 7:22 am (#)
The only 100:0 book I’ve ever read in my life is The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.
“Did you not detect bullshit because it wasn’t there or because it was too advanced for you to understand?” is a rather apt description.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:56 am (#)
I’m feeling this book is going to be Outliers…. just a feeling.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:39 am (#)
Depends on what you define bullshit as, I suppose. I would consider the Celestine Prophecy to be in the 20:80 realm by your scaling, but really that book didn’t have so much bullshit as it did just regular ‘ol shit. Bad writing anchored on a few interesting concepts.
I think this is a good scaling for political / self-help books, but it kind of falls flat on fiction or storytelling. Which is the larger percentage of the book world, unless I’m mistaken.
Cheers,
m
March 4th, 2009 at 10:20 am (#)
For me, I’d be putting Atlas Shrugged more in the 90:10 category, or perhaps 85:15, if we’re splitting hairs. I think there’s a lot of good, clear, logical thinking there — as well as some extra junk that’s just the personal affectations of an author with strong opinions. I feel about Rand a lot like Michael Shermer does: able to recognize the cult-like aspects of Objectivism, and catch the psychological mistakes she makes, yet still very much influenced by her thinking and convinced that she had a number of things rightly figured out. Or was at least on the right track.
I’d put many of Richard Dawkins’ books in the 90:10 category, especially those like The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. Enormously compelling, they finally get you to the point where you start to believe that you really might understand evolution on a fundamental level, and understand it well enough to be able to explain it to novices and defend it from attackers.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:30 am (#)
[...] reading this blog entry I can only assume that you’re familiar with Hang’s (let’s call it) obsession with social media and social design, so I won’t delve into that. Instead I will talk a little bit more about [...]
March 10th, 2009 at 8:40 am (#)
Now I heart you- and yet you do not know me.
Try:
100 Years of solitude
Lamb:the gospel according to jesus’s best friend
Good omens
comics (sandman and preacher are fun)
A Prayer for Owen Meany
ummm… I have to get back to work, or else I’d bother you more.
March 10th, 2009 at 8:42 am (#)
PS- you categorize them. I’d like to see where you place what.
March 10th, 2009 at 2:21 pm (#)
Hi Jesa,
I don’t think it works for fiction books in the same way that it works for non-fiction but I’d like to know what you think.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:47 pm (#)
Hey, Boudewijn.. This sounds really interesting.. I’ll bug you to tell me more next time I see you
March 14th, 2009 at 8:14 am (#)
With all due respect, your designer may want to rethink your logo. It appears to be a bumblebee spermatozoon.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:45 am (#)
Agreed. I frequently check events on the go and to have to open the iphone mobile site then click to switch to the low-tech mobile site before having any way to interact with events is madness!
March 16th, 2009 at 2:41 pm (#)
I don’t get it. Are you just talking about the feed item aggregator they turned off that used to turn things like perhaps this into “xianhang posted 5 photos”?
March 16th, 2009 at 3:10 pm (#)
Not just the aggregator, they seem to have turned off or drastically turned down the filter that shows you only relevant content. It means that any one of my friends can (and have) dominated half my feed with nothing I can do about it.
March 18th, 2009 at 7:39 pm (#)
Hang, you are awesome.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:43 pm (#)
Don’t you just love how now you see EVERYTHING people send to each other… even people you don’t know??
March 27th, 2009 at 3:07 am (#)
[...] yet another media establishment is running the fallacious facebook redesign argument and acting all clever about it. Sadly, this time it’s one I actually [...]
March 28th, 2009 at 11:53 am (#)
Dude, you were right on the money with this post. I had the same symptoms on my iPhone3G. I tried what you had posted and it brought my iPhone back to life.
Tks alot.
April 4th, 2009 at 6:03 am (#)
i deactivated my facebook account because of what they have done bloody stupid why make it like twitter now that is sad
April 6th, 2009 at 8:18 pm (#)
[...] new system is compared to the control. Simple numbers, simple paper. But as I pointed out in my blog post on virtual worlds, the truth is that real life interaction really isn’t all that great and the true power of [...]
April 7th, 2009 at 2:23 am (#)
Pictures??? Videos??? Please!!
April 7th, 2009 at 3:37 am (#)
JV: If you do a flickr search for CHI2009 there’s plenty of photos. I’m not sure if the talks for this year are going public but I’m pretty sure each presenter will be sent a copy of the talk. You could try emailing them for a copy.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:42 am (#)
Thanks! Am looking forward to hearing more of your experiences (was hoping to attend but can’t).
April 7th, 2009 at 1:40 pm (#)
[...] For information about day 1, see here [...]
April 9th, 2009 at 3:32 am (#)
[...] Day 2 [...]
April 10th, 2009 at 12:32 pm (#)
[...] Day 3 [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 5:56 pm (#)
Worked for me, thanks!
April 14th, 2009 at 6:10 pm (#)
i don’t think that’s possible without stealing your password! maybe they stole your password and sent mails to yourself bcc’ing a list of spam targets
try changing your pass and see if it goes away?
April 17th, 2009 at 4:20 am (#)
Most of the Window OS/control-panel-item-specific HTML help (CHM) pages have green-coloured text that displays a pop-up definition.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:10 pm (#)
I have found an appreciation of the meme concept in action helps a lot with avoiding this problem…
April 20th, 2009 at 5:29 pm (#)
[...] it to the red headed stepchild of it’s feature list. I talked a while ago about how you could infer company priorities through their mobile offerings and it’s quite telling how facebook regards events. Let’s review the status [...]
April 21st, 2009 at 11:35 am (#)
[...] Well, the 30 days are over and it’s been quite an interesting experiment. I’m quite proud that I managed to get a blog post done every single day. One of those posts was inexplicably eaten by the server, one was kind of bullshit and one was done several hours after the deadline. All in all, by my calculations, I think that counts as one $20 donation and one beer that I owe to Jeff. [...]
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:30 pm (#)
This is certainly something that I’m personally sensitive to, and think that it’ll take something of a generational shift to get towards better-design open platforms. One of the things that “open” tends towards is the “middle”, since, in order to get more people to contribute, you’ve got to make political compromises in order to gain a wider following.
Oftentimes this means adding more and more features rather than cutting (or, in writing terms, “editing”). I think a balance between app- and plugin-based platforms is necessary, so you need to find that sweet spot between meeting the baseline needs of a wide audience (motivating developers to want to build on your platform) and providing enough surface areas for devs to hook into that they can build satisfying extensions (see Firefox, Ubiquity and/or Adium).
That said, design succeeds where there is a vision that is checked against a broad reality. I think Apple is succeeding here, and happens to provide a built-in income model as well (whereas the Mozilla community does not).
Worth considering, for sure.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:24 pm (#)
Your Calorie tracking example illustrates that Mechanical Turk relies heavily on tremendous inequities in wealth.
The rich, fat, lazy person snaps a picture of his lavish meal with a fancy iPhone, and rather than take a brief moment to ponder the calories, … uploads it for, not just one, but *three* other people to ponder and estimate the calories and report back. The most dissimilar answer is rejected; that person is not compensated.
This only works if there is a very large pool of very poor people who are willing to do these mundane tasks for (fractions of) pennies. These “workers” certainly can’t afford an iPhone; they probably can’t even afford the meal they are looking at.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:29 pm (#)
There’s a common perception that Mechanical Turk thrives on exploiting 3rd world labor. This doesn’t appear to be the case.
From:
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanical-turk-demographics.html and
http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2008/07/mechanical-turk-demographics.html
82% of turkers are from the US, Canada or the UK and over 75% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher.
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:09 pm (#)
So, is amazon also keeping track of the pics and the classifications for the purposes of training machine learning algorithms in the future?
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:16 pm (#)
@David Jones
Nope. It simply means the efficiency of counting calories for your meal, while eating it, and counting calories for a living are extremely different.
I can easily imagine having a calorie-counting job, where I can look at a photo, recognize the ingredients, maybe receive a total portion weight along with the photo and make an estimate, all in less then a minute. Probably a lot less, because of the 80/20 rule (80% the pictures will be common meals, for which I’d know the contents by heart).
So 1 minute per photo, 60 minutes pe hour – easily $30 per hour. Not exactly you average third world income, is it?
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:12 pm (#)
Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:20 pm (#)
[...] Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor « Bumblebee Labs Blog When Amazon released its iPhone app my entire understanding of what was possible changed. You load up the app, snap a picture of an object, Amazon will use Mechanical Turk to find the closest Amazon equivalent and, within about 5 minutes, you can buy it for one click. The application itself was a beautiful usage of Mechanical Turk but more interesting is how a shift in thinking had to occur before it could even be imagined. That Amazon is releasing this app for free but paying for human labor means their business model relies on human labor being cheap enough to hide in the margins. (tags: ui design architecture collaboration crowdsourcing mobile) [...]
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:20 pm (#)
@FutureWork: I’m sure they store the images but I don’t think they have any immediate plans to provide any machine learning. It’s a hard enough problem and MTurkers do a good enough job that there’s no immediate incentive.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:34 pm (#)
You should see Lilly Irani’s work on Mechanical Turk at http://www.differenceengines.com/ and http://turkwork.differenceengines.com/blog/
Especially check out the Haikus.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm (#)
@David Jones
Paying a Turker for their labor and accepting their work for your own purposes are completely separate (to me). I pay everyone for their work (except for blatent scams), even if their work wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
Also, in my many adventures on MTurk — I can attest to their caliber. Not only are they not 3rd world (I’ve paid IRS agents, United Nations employees, scientists, etc.), they are quite considerate and diligent.
April 24th, 2009 at 3:00 am (#)
This is very up-to-date info. I think I’ll share it on Facebook.
April 24th, 2009 at 3:02 am (#)
This topic is quite trendy in the net at the moment. What do you pay attention to while choosing what to write ?
April 24th, 2009 at 8:02 am (#)
Great post. Your writing points that we talked about come off really well here. I want to talk more about Friennuendo, something is pinging in my head on this topic.
April 24th, 2009 at 8:03 pm (#)
[...] Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor « Bumblebee Labs Blog (tags: economics architecture) [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 4:27 am (#)
eye-opening post, thanks
April 27th, 2009 at 6:15 am (#)
LOL, you couldn’t spell gmail.COM properly first go.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:16 am (#)
BUG: And since I left out the website field of the comment submission form, the default value “website” is now the URL for my post-name-link.
April 28th, 2009 at 10:35 am (#)
[...] Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor « Bumblebee Labs Blog – [...]
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:42 pm (#)
While on the surface your logic looks good, it is quite biased. You associate the word “atheism” with crackpot theories in your analogies. You then associate the belief in one god with the specific answers that contain the most evidence, ie Shakespeare’s identity and the cause of 9/11. The difference here is that in your analogy, the cause of 9/11, arab terrorists, would need to contain just as much evidence as UFO’s attacking NYC. That is the only way your analogy works. Hence, your analogies fail. Good try, though.
May 2nd, 2009 at 5:02 pm (#)
Well it’s a different category, but not merely of the internal logic. There is a cultural and historical distinctness. A naivety and worldliness.
May 2nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm (#)
Religious people should learn to stay away from logic. If they were any good at it then they wouldn’t be religious.
May 2nd, 2009 at 6:13 pm (#)
The 9/11 analogy really doesn’t work, it would mean that I dismiss all theories on 9/11 which would mean I believe 9/11 never happened, which we have evidence for, for example, the WTC buildings aren’t there any more. Since it definitely happened you’re left with believing the option that’s most logical to you (based on real evidence).
Let’s then apply that to God, there’s no definite evidence that he/she/it exists (I know a lot of people cite ‘personal religious experience’, but I mean tangible evidence) therefore all theories about which of our religious deities is the correct God have the same merit, so if you dismiss all but one of these theories, then why not that last one?
May 2nd, 2009 at 6:18 pm (#)
Wait, prayers get answered? I prayed for twenty five years and didn’t get shit.
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:39 pm (#)
In the original quote, the words “we are both atheists” means “we both don’t believe in gods”. It was a one-liner, you can’t take it at face value.
For a 9/11 parable to make sense, you would have to say something like “I contend we are both conspiracy theorists about 9/11. I just believe in fewer conspirators than you. When you understand why you dismiss the craziest of the theories (e.g. lasers from satellites or UFOs), you will understand why I dismiss your controlled demolition theory.”
It still doesn’t quite work, however. Unlike there being ZERO physical evidence for the existence of a god, there is evidence that controlled demolition theorists can point to, no matter how weak, flawed, or circumstantial.
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:51 pm (#)
And for the Shakespeare parable to work, it would have to be:
“I contend that we both believe certain works of Shakespeare were not written by a man named William Shakespeare. I just believe in fewer works being written by a man named William Shakespeare than you. When you understand why you don’t believe [works here] was written by a man named William Shakespeare, you will understand why I don’t believe [work here] was.”
This still doesn’t work, however, because there may be different circumstances why you don’t believe certain works were written by Shakespeare than with others (e.g. some might have a different language style/prose used indicating different authorship, and for others manuscripts may have been found with different authors indicating they had written it under the name Shakespeare). In the original quote, the circumstances for not believing in another god such as Zues or Thor are the EXACT SAME circumstances for not believing in Yahweh.
May 6th, 2009 at 3:52 am (#)
Poorly written. This jumble of words doesn’t make enough sense. Yes, people hate complainers and problems. Most of this writing on this page is either naive or simply poorly thought out.
May 6th, 2009 at 11:25 am (#)
This is my first introduction into the MT. Having looked at it, I would mention that if the service were more widely used-in relation to say, the number of people who shop at Amazon-then it might be more difficult to find people who are able/willing to work as MTs. As the service scales up, its demographics, and how it works, will change. That said, it makes sense that most people would be in the US/Canada, we have VASTLY more people on computers than most other places, are at the cutting edge of services like this. Also, there is a big difference between MTs for products, I would imagine, than MTs for food simply because there is more access to profit through products by sellers becoming/hiring MTs.
All that said, there is a good chance that this could provide some insight into the future organization of the labor market, although I would assume it will end up being something like a MT version of call centers.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:44 am (#)
Worked Great for me…thanks!!
May 8th, 2009 at 4:10 pm (#)
Nice!
May 8th, 2009 at 5:56 pm (#)
“Atheists are atheists because the implications of a God existing is so morally threatening that atheists must construct a psychological shield that justifies their immorality and secularism.”
Respond to the fact that you just claimed that all atheists are inherently immoral. On what grounds could you possibly make this claim?
Please clarify the claim that atheists label themselves atheists to protect themselves from the ‘morally threatening’ possibility of a god existing.
May 8th, 2009 at 6:25 pm (#)
Read the preceding and following sentences and it makes sense:
Because this distinction is not made clear, most of the Christians I talk to believe that atheists are God deniers. Atheists are atheists because the implications of a God existing is so morally threatening that atheists must construct a psychological shield that justifies their immorality and secularism. The idea that atheists are actually capable of answering the preceeding questions is so astounding that it’s never even considered.
May 10th, 2009 at 1:47 pm (#)
All you are doing is replacing words with other words. Doing that with anything completely changes the meaning and so your argument has no actual points.
May 12th, 2009 at 4:03 pm (#)
[...] … Unless you can succinctly and explain what your target market is and why they appreciate your product, you’re not being polarizing, you’re just giving yourself permission to swear a lot and draw whales on your website. – Xianhang Zhang [...]
May 13th, 2009 at 2:31 pm (#)
Dude,this works just great, saved my iPhone, thanks!!!
May 13th, 2009 at 3:25 pm (#)
Yeah, your giving into logical fallacy called straw man argument. Instead of addressing the argument (which you should) you instead try and make the argument you dislike so absurd that it seems stupid. Instead, ask yourself if you do understand why, exactly, you deny all other possible gods. It really isn’t hard.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:48 am (#)
[...] What Gets Measured Gets Done Posted by Zubon on May 21, 2009 in General and Lord of the Rings Online. if you display each user’s post count under their username, then people are going to start posting a lot. If you implement a karma score, then people will try and do things that maximize karma. Not only [is] exposing information about valued work important, not exposing information can also be an important design strategy. – Xianhang Zhang [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 11:47 pm (#)
Interesting points! I was actually thinking about this topic last night and this morning (particularly how to incorporate it into my own blog). Thanks for the tips, bro!
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:51 pm (#)
now I’ll stay in touch..
May 27th, 2009 at 3:15 pm (#)
yeah. facebook changes to much for my liking. twitter doesn’t offer enough. myspace is too cluttered and just looks awful. I did however set up an account at http://www.putiton.com It’s some sort of new site geared toward music and the arts. I’l let you know how this goes….
May 27th, 2009 at 6:45 pm (#)
Hang: thanks for the notes and reflections on CHI! I was sad to miss the conference this year, and so was glad to get a sense of your experience there.
I initially found this post searching for CoCollage-related material. First, a quick clarification: Strands Labs Seattle is part of Corvallis, OR-based Strands Labs, Inc., but I think of us as a “startup within a startup”. The paper Shelly Farnham presented at CHI was based, in part, on an earlier finding of general voids in social support as being an incentive for people to seek out a sense of community and develop “third place attachment” at / through coffeehouses. One such void – for some [most?] people – may well be getting laid, and while supporting that goal has not been our primary focus in CoCollage, it may be that we are missing an opportunity to better serve an underserved segment of the coffeehouse community. I / we will ponder that some more …
And, if / when you’re next pondering the issue of comments on blogs – and your comment about comments was part of what motivated me to post a comment – I don’t think that blog comments are broken, per se, but there is a much talked about power law distribution of participation in various social spheres. I have often pondered comments – and lack thereof – and what they really mean. I, too, have written about commenting on my blog, e.g., Commenting on Comments (http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2007/09/dont-take-anyth.html) and Commenting on Validation / Validating Comments (http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2008/02/commenting-on-v.html). Unfortunately, in the first post, I think I lost a commenter, blog reader and perhaps a friend.
More recently, a series of posts on Community by the Numbers at the Life with Alacrity blog (http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/) may [also] be of interest.
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:44 pm (#)
Para. I – Prepositions are not good to end sentences with.
Perhaps you should rethink all of this.
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:32 pm (#)
@Brent: That is just the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!
~Winston Churchill, approximately
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:09 pm (#)
[...] prasmes, bet juk ne vien apie prasmes klausinėjame. Vakar, baigdamas perskaityti internetą, viename jo kampe radau atsakymą į ne mažiau svarbų klausimą „kodėl visi aplink tokie kvaili?“. Jo esmė – [...]
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:30 am (#)
>the level of intellectual shallowness and mindlessness most economic professionals were operating under. Sure, they knew the theory and how to apply it but they also believed that, because they knew it, it was true.
This is an interesting and controversial claim. This post would be more persuasive if this part was explored further. Maybe you could write a post all about that? I found you from Hacker News, so I’m sure you’re aware of Paul Graham’s Disagreement Hierarchy. I hope you find some quotes from some economists to refute, and it would especially useful if you could differentiate by each school of macroeconomics.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:59 pm (#)
There are several discrepencies in your logic… comparing the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent being to the existence of a playwright is ignorant at best. For one thing we know shakespeare once lived, he was real, whether or not he penned all those beautiful sonnets, I do not know, however, that may be a more valid discussion. But, we know they were written by a man, and most likely an existing one. Comparing an event to a man is invalid, I suppose you could employ popular (il) logic and say, I haven’t seen it, but I feel it, or I feel the wtc towers are still there, it is a fact that they are not. Now apply that to a god… I feel there is a god, as do most people, but I cannot prove it in any %. Or, I know there is not a god because there is no evidence of one. Quit being stupid, think for
yourself.
June 4th, 2009 at 3:08 pm (#)
I like the title!
June 5th, 2009 at 10:22 pm (#)
Hi, Congratulations to the site owner for this marvelous work you’ve done. It has lots of useful and interesting data.
June 10th, 2009 at 5:22 am (#)
[...] I said in a previous post on lying through the use of not statistically significant: Sometimes, I swear, the more statistically savvy a person thinks they are, the easier they are to [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 8:41 am (#)
In regards to the last paragraph, I’m comfortable giving out my personal information at my discretion. I’m not comfortable with others giving out my information at their discretion.
Other than that, an interesting idea.
June 10th, 2009 at 9:19 am (#)
“Heard it here first”?
Hardly, this kind of thing has been bandied about for months and months now!
June 10th, 2009 at 9:25 am (#)
It’s nice to see such thoughtful criticism – but the fact that you generated a similar shape using a random process doesn’t mean that there’s no statistical significance in our data. If you put your graph and our graph side-by-side, you will notice that your graph is somewhat more symmetric. A p-value of 0.04 means that just over one in twenty times you will get a mean greater than or equal to ours.
You say, “The blog entry claims that there was a minor but significant (p < 0.04) difference in overall quality but it’s obvious from the null graph that no individual query is statistically different in quality (I’d unfortunately have to dig out my stats textbook to figure out what test I would need to run to verify this but I’m pretty confidant on my eyeball estimate).” — I’m not sure why you’re surprised that there can be a statistically significant difference in aggregate but not in individual queries.
BTW – We work hard to present data honestly. I think it’s somewhat over the top to call your blog post “Another way to lie with statistics”. I’m sorry that our graph mislead you into thinking there were patterns that may be due to noise. I think the graph does a nice job of laying out exactly what our data set consists of.
June 10th, 2009 at 9:38 am (#)
Lukas: I apologize if you interpreted my post to mean I ascribe intent to your actions. Perhaps mislead would have been more appropriate. The graphs that show the aggregate differences between search engines are something which I think is an appropriate representation of the data because, indeed, as you point out, there are aggregate differences in the data. However, because there are no individual differences, I don’t agree that it was appropriate to present the individual queries. All they do is mislead people into seeing patterns where they don’t exist. If you want to present the dataset of queries, I would do it in table form so that there’s no suggestion of a pattern.
Again, I’m sorry if this post came across as overly critical. I’ve done the same thing many times myself so I’m very sympathetic to the reasons behind why you made the choices you do. I simply wanted to provide an alternative presentation of the data.
June 10th, 2009 at 9:51 am (#)
“opening up of the API to full camera controls”
Are you sure this is true? From what I’ve seen they haven’t opened up anything. The only related new API I found was an addition to UIImagePickerController that allows you to capture video, but it works just like capturing images, it only gives you the final result, not a realtime feed.
June 10th, 2009 at 10:23 am (#)
Yeah, the camera API hasn’t been opened, so there is still a huge roadblock to most of these ideas.
June 10th, 2009 at 11:26 am (#)
Hang – I think you’re off base. The presentation of the data Lukas gives tells you something informative, namely the distribution of individual differences. If he just reported means and standard errors, I would have no idea if the difference was driven by a few outliers or say a small but consistent superiority on every query term.
June 10th, 2009 at 1:21 pm (#)
That’s odd, because the Picture Me app is using OpenCV and can do some pretty real image processing on the camera input. Even works on my old 2G phone. It snaps the shutter when it detects a face in the frame.
http://blog.beetlebugsoftware.com/post/104154581/face-detection-iphone-source
June 10th, 2009 at 1:23 pm (#)
And, ironically enough, it’s from the same site as this. Sorry for the confusion! I’m an idiot.
June 10th, 2009 at 5:08 pm (#)
[...] The killer app for iPhone 3GS « Bumblebee Labs Blog (tags: augmented-reality iphone) [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 5:20 pm (#)
Hang,
I love this post. Even if Apple has not yet fully opened up a live video stream for applications to build into their apps, it’s only a matter of time before they do or some other similar device steps up to provide an environment for this innovation.
I think all of the scenarios you described could occur by way of a variety of devices that I’m sure will be emerging and not all on just the iPhone. The idea of any device being a screen would work best most likely using a portable pocket projector. That way you could point to a surface and then start reaching into the projection and moving things around. And the Quake reality game idea would work best as an eye piece. Maybe you hook an eye piece screen up to an iPhone or similar pocket computer and it recognizes your hand to be a gun or a sword and you can go fight your friends that it recognize to be team players. All of the weapons can be overlaid on top of the video and you could have even added sound effects and voice conversations to be part of the game.
We’ll see how far the iPhone can take us in terms of scanning the 3d world around us. Maybe we’ll be seeing more laser technology for scanning objects. Maybe that is a direction iPhone will take us at some point. A future model might have a laser pointer that is a fun tool to play with cats but also if your cat sits still allows you to create a very accurate 3D object of the cat as you rotate the device around the cat and the image information that is recorded could create a texture map on top of the cat and then your cat could be the visual representation of the talking voice that tells you what song is playing and who you are calling.
Who knows what will happen but it’s neat to be along for the ride.
Thanks for creating this post and to @jgilliam for tweeting it.
Arin
June 10th, 2009 at 6:19 pm (#)
Amen. I’ve been hoping someone would do this even without the compass… server-offloaded (dare I say “cloud”) video processing with positioning hints should be able to achieve nice accuracy for 3D object capture.
Hopefully the positioning is close enough to make a SunPad experience good enough.
June 10th, 2009 at 7:27 pm (#)
[...] Augmented Reality is the killer app for the iPhone 3GS — 5:53pm via Google [...]
June 11th, 2009 at 1:38 am (#)
[...] BumblebeeLabs fantasizes about what’s coming up on the software front now that the iPhone has a compass and an open video camera API in addition to its accelerometers and GPS. Exciting stuff. [...]
June 11th, 2009 at 4:32 am (#)
This are my people talking here!
:)
I love your passion for what is possible in with technology and i love all the comments!
June 11th, 2009 at 5:24 am (#)
The accelerometer in the iPhone is far too crude for any of this to work. It can’t be used to measure anything relative to the real world, because the values returned have no units. And it can’t measure orientation independently from acceleration and movement. The only thing it can give you a reliable reading of is the phone’s orientation relative to the ground, and only then, when it’s being held completely still.
So your ideas require much more sophisticated hardware than Apple currently provides.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:38 am (#)
“X-Ray” vision for construction / repair / maintenance. Scan the iPhone over a street and see the buried pipes (documented by plans on archive or “as built” pictures”) See piping in walls, etc. Recognize electrical panels, large mechanical devices, etc. and like existing AR (e.g., used in aircraft maintenance and some other high cost applications), overlay diagrams and other useful information. This brings known value AR into a whole new market.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:44 am (#)
The iphone is getting better, but it is far from the ultimate augmented reality device. Sure, expect to see a bunch of basic AR applications coming out that take advantage of the accelerometers and the compass, but will ultimately still be gimmicky. The “really cool stuff” (at least half of the stuff you have listed in this article) will require a few more generations of iphones and a supporting back-end (or cloud) infrastructure. Just because you can do some marker tracking or face tracking (it isn’t really face *recognition* or *identification* just yet) doesn’t mean that AR is ready for prime time. Give it a few years… it is definitely coming.
Check out my presentation at Mobile Monday Amsterdam if you want to know more about what I think about it… http://www.mobilemonday.nl/talks/robert-rice-augmented-reality/
June 11th, 2009 at 7:54 am (#)
Joe: Any apps that do that are using undocumented APIs and Apple is largely turning a blind eye to it at the moment.
Graham: Any AR app would probably work using a combination of accelerometer and feature tracking to correct for drift. Andrew Davidson did some great work on this when I was working in the area if you want to check out what was possible back in 2004.
Robert: It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be good enough. The iPhone is going to be the first real AR experience for a large number of people and it’s going to cement it as an interaction style of it’s own right.
June 11th, 2009 at 11:33 am (#)
It’s not a question of “correcting drift”. That’s like saying the iPhone’s light sensor can be used as a forward-facing camera just by applying a bit of color correction. It’s not the accuracy of the information from the camera that’s the problem but the richness of it.
June 11th, 2009 at 1:45 pm (#)
Zzz. Heard of wikitude?? Been there, done that
June 12th, 2009 at 5:33 am (#)
[...] first discovered this obviously wrong truth when I was doing my honors thesis. Time and again, I would come up with a novel idea or a neat [...]
June 12th, 2009 at 6:07 am (#)
Forwarded to my entire office, thanks!
June 12th, 2009 at 11:46 am (#)
I think Lukas is right that this post’s title is out of line. Let’s all play nicely and constructively.
I like Dolores Labs’ results visualization. I questioned the same issue of whether they were just random. When I ran the outlying queries side by side, they sure looked random. And what you’re seeing for all those queries in the middle of the graph is a very close vote.
Growing up Bayesian, I’m rather allergic to these kinds of significance tests. What I’d like to do is run my models of voted inference to estimate annotator bias, randomness, and overall prevalence of preferences. Hmm, maybe Lukas’ll share the raw data.
One reason is that “significance” depends on the test. Paired t-tests vs. grouped t-tests, one-sided vs. two-sided, replication adjusted or not. Another reason is that they are just as freighted with assumptions about how the data’s generated as with Bayesian priors. Yet another is that significant doesn’t mean important; with more queries and evaluators, a 50.1 vs. 49.1 preference could be significant, even though a typical user would never notice it.
At least bootstrap variance estimation (on Google > Bing) would be reasonably easy to interpret.
I believe what this post is suggesting is to test vs. the null hypothesis of “was generated by a Binomial(0.5) distribution”. I’m not very well classically trained, but I’d hope that’d be close to a two-sided t-test given the sample size.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:05 pm (#)
Ideas are neither right nor wrong in an absolute sense. What is right in one circumstance is wrong in another. What was true yesterday is false today.
Conditioned co-production … states that all things arise in dependence on conditions, and cease when those conditions cease. Things have neither absolute existence nor absolute non-existence – they have relative existence.
Ultimate reality is inexpressible (though millions of people claim to express it and blog it daily) … but
I am sure you’ll figure this shit out, because you have taken the first step. You have opened the gateless gate.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:15 pm (#)
OK, y’all have inspired me to crack open my statistics textbook again. Unfortunately, my statistics textbook is pretty useless so I’m going to wing it. As far as I can remember, the more hypotheses you test, the higher the p factor has to be for any one hypothesis to avoid fishing for significance. Given k elements, if you want to test whether any set of element is biased towards a particular search engine, there are 2^k possible hypotheses so your significance factor has to be something like 1-(1/2^k) which, of course, is a ridiculously high standard that clearly none of the datapoints match.
As such, what you’re presenting is the null hypothesis graph except in a form which at least I was unused to seeing. Is it right to present a null hypothesis graph? Clearly opinions differ but to me, it’s perhaps about a serious an error as presenting data with too many significant figures. Not a grave sin but something a good statistician should be conscientious about. The only reason I wrote about it was because, I was surprised that even I as a reasonable trained statistics guy was momentarily caught off guard by it. Clearly, you meant nothing malicious by it but it’s a technique that could be used for malicious purposes so I wrote about it.
I’ve amended the title to tone down the rhetoric.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:04 am (#)
I would like to piont out that, while this is largely true and has precedence (Edison or Bell did not invent many of the things tfor which they take credit), the role of the person who “rediscovers” something is to popularize it. If something is valuable and yet unknown, it might as well not have been invented. Therefore, discover something, see if it did any good, find some sort of application for it and make it popular. In so doing, you may think you are not original, but you actually are since you are taking an idea and actually doing something with it.
By the way, sometimes when you come up with something and take a relatively new angle on it, you have to jump on the idea in order to get any play out of it. For me, I wrote my senior thesis on some ideas about globalization, ethnicity, inequality, and development. Almost immediately after finishing the thesis, I started seeing a million NEW works being discussed and some starting to get published. I was just part of a trend. Frustrating, but at least I know that I am either right or part of a very large group of wrong people.
June 15th, 2009 at 1:02 pm (#)
[...] The killer app for iPhone 3GS « Bumblebee Labs Blog – technology iphone programming toread futures [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 9:11 am (#)
Michael, I spent quite some time trying to generate a response to this until I realized I already wrote one: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/nov-10th-day-28-the-crisis-in-economics
I’m going to devote a couple of future articles to “things I had to unlearn about economics” but that post is a good summary of my position.
June 17th, 2009 at 7:02 pm (#)
[...] few days ago, I wrote about a case of a seemingly fascinating graph which I felt was used inappropriately. I was rightfully castigated in the comments for being too [...]
June 19th, 2009 at 2:14 am (#)
[...] about augmented reality – Stuff.tv IBM launches new smartphone apps for Wimbledon – The Guardian The Killer app for iPhone 3GS – BumbleBee [...]
June 25th, 2009 at 5:28 am (#)
[...] The Killer App for iPhone 3G[S] chez Bumblebee Labs [...]
June 29th, 2009 at 8:37 pm (#)
[...] as an end goal. I’ve been a heavy advocate for this ever since I wrote my post about how statistics is a philosophy subject. 0 people like this [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 7:32 am (#)
Perhaps, but I'd have to point out: it wouldn't occur to me immediately that adding ethanol to water will give 19.2 gallons instead of 20, and anyone who is observant enough to point that out would indeed be a good candidate for employment.
The purpose of interview questions isn't even to get the right answer; interview questions are often ways to try to see how someone thinks, or how someone interacts with others.
Thus, a better answer to eating two cookies may very well be “16…and a few crumbs!” Such answer would amuse both a teacher and an interviewer!
June 30th, 2009 at 4:49 am (#)
[...] The digital universe is getting closer and closer to you, this new reality will become your natural extension. All these by using obsolete technology [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 4:46 pm (#)
in dfu mode my computer does that beep thing when u plug stuff in and my itunes doesent detect it i jailbroke it with quickpwn its a 1irst gen iphone
July 4th, 2009 at 12:10 pm (#)
Ideas are not unique. They happen when the preconditions for the idea exist and someone makes the intuitive leap. There are many examples throughout history. How many ideas did Leonardo have? How many were “discovered” later? Remember that most of Leonardo's work (the Codex) is missing. In science, many labs tend to discover the same results or reach the same or similar conclusions simultaneously. It then becomes a race to publication. This is also the case with inventions and the race to patent.
Great blog. Keep it up!
July 4th, 2009 at 12:14 pm (#)
great post. however you have forgotten the potentials of massive interconnectivity via social network. think: distributed application. distributed sensing. global pooling of individually collected data / comments. This is where the true power of the iPhone will appear.
July 28th, 2009 at 9:23 pm (#)
Great analysis of an emerging decentralized workforce. This site has some inspiring stories and windows into the lives of people who Turk for a living.
http://mechanicalturkdiaries.com/
The Mechanical Turk Diaries – the voice of Amazon's anonymous workforce. Unedited memoirs from Turkers.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:00 pm (#)
My guess is that their initial design was “type shit to go to shit.com, and type ?shit to search for shit on google.” Then they decided that a url and a search keyword is essentially the same shit, merged and streamlined the functionality and left the ctrl-k query mark behind like the proverbial Macaulay Culkin.
Solution? Train yourself to use Ctrl-D. Now that Opera and Firefox have caved too; it is the cross-browser shortcut to focus and select the url box.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:03 pm (#)
…by which I mean Alt-D, of course.
July 31st, 2009 at 4:28 am (#)
It's probably because CTRL-K is the normal search key combo on Firefox. You're looking for CTRL-L, which takes you to the location bar, highlights the current URL, and lets you type in a new one. Or, as someone else said, ALT-D
I actually kinda like that they have the two different key combos, despite using only a single text entry box.
August 1st, 2009 at 10:41 am (#)
[...] the no obnoxious rich people paradox may be the key to also understanding the no evil geniuses paradox. In both cases, the paradox is that it’s so easy to imagine these people existing that [...]
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:28 pm (#)
Putting a question mark before something in the address box searches it in Google instead of going to the address (if you type “?www.google.com”, you'll get a google search page, not the home page). So the ctrl + k (or ctrl + e) will mimik the other browser's search box function : by putting a question mark.
Otherwise ctrl + l or alt + d is what you actually seem to want to do…
August 4th, 2009 at 3:05 pm (#)
U R GAY and the only ego deleemma you have is why your daddy didn't butt-bang you harder!
August 4th, 2009 at 4:17 pm (#)
How did this get posted so damn high on Hacker news? I was expecting something along the lines of business. Not some whacked up bit on pre-nups.
August 4th, 2009 at 10:48 pm (#)
I told my therapist about Feynman's solution to the ego dilemma (without revealing that it was from Feynman)… she replied that that was a sign of a truly confident person. Which you aren't, it seems. Or else you'd have solved it too.
August 5th, 2009 at 7:45 am (#)
[...] Dream Job is so stunningly obvious that it must be wrong. I can’t possibly have been the first person to have come up with this. But if it’s [...]
August 9th, 2009 at 3:47 am (#)
[...] my recent post, the ego dilemma, I said my favourite ego dilemma was couples who didn’t believe in signing a pre-nup before [...]
August 9th, 2009 at 3:28 pm (#)
Ego is a necessary part of human advancement and personal wealth. If some jackass didn't get the idea in his head that he was smarter or better than those that came before him, we wouldn't have the advances that we do.
Yes, that thinking leads to a ton of failures, but as a society on the whole we benefit from the one success when it finally does happen. Chase your “dumb” idea, allowing your ego to shove aside your fear of failure and embarrassment. Try to have fun along the way as well, soak up any lessons you can from each little failure, an revel in each little success. Live in each moment and don't worry if you reach the original destination.
At least you'll have a good time pursuing what you want and (with a little humility) learn a few things along the way!
August 9th, 2009 at 3:38 pm (#)
This strikes me as ENTIRELY the wrong attitude with regard to innovation. The reason great discoveries get made, or great ideas take off, is because someone somewhere thought precisely what you sarcastically describe above, and was right about it! They were able to overcome the nagging little voice in the back of their heads telling them that no, surely some much smarter person has already thought of this and dismissed it for some good reason that they're just not capable of realizing yet, so why even bother trying to get this idea off the ground?
Being innovative does require having some amount of arrogance (or ego), sure, but that's not a bad thing! The proper response to someone who thinks they've figured out one of the holy grail problems is not to be annoyed and disdainful without ever giving them a fair hearing; it's to listen to their idea, think it through on the merits, and either dismiss it (and give them your reason why) or encourage them to go with it. If you tell them up front why it won't work, they'll either listen or they won't. But if you just sniff and say, “As if!” before even hearing their idea or thinking it through, then they shouldn't listen to you because your pointless and baseless closed-mindedness serves no purpose.
August 9th, 2009 at 7:56 pm (#)
Do you know how most discoveries are done? , someone is drunk with and idea that makes him work a lot for putting this idea to work, and they discovered the idea they thought about was wrong, but SOMETHING GREAT they didn't think about is discovered in the process.
Imagine being google founders, or any founder, if you doubt about you, you stop working. You know what the Teslamotors electric car makers said, we didn't thought it was going to be so difficult, IF WE KNEW PROBABLY WE DIDN'T HAD STARTED. Same happened with Pixar, trolltech, whatever.
Passion is what powers them all. Stop using your brain to stop you.
August 10th, 2009 at 7:44 pm (#)
You can still consistently believe you have a billion dollar idea, and the most people who think they have billion dollar ideas are wrong, so long as you are open to the possibility that you are wrong. You don't have to think you're somehow special.
This should really be true of anything you believe. Tons of people have basic facts wrong, but there's a set of basic facts you think you're right about.
August 11th, 2009 at 1:50 pm (#)
Yes. For example, it was completely ludicrous for two grad students to think that they could do search better than all the companies that had poured over a billion dollars into search engines and search portals and search aggregators in the preceding years. Come on, guys, altavista and yahoo! and lycos have got this thing down. Go run off and build an online storefront like all your friends are doing.
In order to be successful, I think you have to have a certain amount of hubris. If you're paralyzed by the thought that, no matter what you're trying to do, other smarter people have tried and failed…well, you're not going to do anything. Obviously it's very possible to go too far in this direction, but imagine where we would be today if various entrepreneurs had backed down thinking “oh, well, others already tried that and I guess I'm not smarter than they are, huh?”
August 12th, 2009 at 7:54 am (#)
There's a difference between “the holy grail problem can be solved” and “you will solve the holy grail problem”. Yes, they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown.
August 16th, 2009 at 8:59 am (#)
tried F6 ?
August 17th, 2009 at 4:47 pm (#)
I'll start things off. I'm Hang and I'm the author.
My charity of choice is the ACLU.
August 17th, 2009 at 6:13 pm (#)
Isn't saturation the most obvious solution?
In a small scale marketing campaigns you can approximate that doubling the exposure will double the results, so talk about conversion ration etc. makes sense, but it will obviously not continue forever. Spam is just ridiculously cheap to send, what they optimize is total amount of replies, not amount of replies per spam. Every extra billion of spams gets you fewer marginal replies than the previous billion, but as long as it's worth more than tiny cost of sending it, it's worth sending that extra billion.
Also such tiny conversion ration don't really violate the facts of marketing. Spam has to first get through all the spam filters, which surely trash vast majority of it. Then you have to deal with people being trained to ignore or delete unsolicited emails. Then the best you can hope for are conversion rates you get from completely untargeted advertisement. And even when someone wants to get 12 inch cock, your rates will be lowered by their lack of trust in your ability to provide it, and their unwillingness to give credit card details to a shady website.
Add all these together and it's not certain that you can do much more than 125 million to 1, or that spammers are really all that bothered about having to send that many spams.
August 17th, 2009 at 6:22 pm (#)
Neat! I think I find the 3rd response on 'wrong foot' more intriguing though.
You miss one crucial distinction here. You are implying that your prototypical example of divorce is a truly random coin-toss like phenomenon. It is not. It is far more like the stock market, with 2 effects: private knowledge and the self-fulfilling prophecy effect. The 3rd response gets to that.
I wouldn't go so far as to conjecture that pre-nups would correlate with higher divorce rates (other confounding variables could come into play, like maybe pre-nup signers being wiser to begin with, and more likely to have made a good choice), but the couple's stance is a rational one. It is the same reason venture capitalists like to keep startup CEO paychecks low (and stock ownership high).
The fourth response is just the most inarticulate version of expression of private information. The couple COULD actually have verifiable information that they are special. For instance, John Gottman's studies show that a great lead predictor of divorce is simply the couple's ratio of “good” to “bad” (contemptuous in particular) moves in a conversation. When that ration is less than about 5:1, chances of eventual divorce skyrocket.
Imagine a couple that knows nothing of Gottman's work, but vaguely, intuitively grasps that they seem to “fight less” than other couples. This feeling could be so subconscious that they can't explain the source of their certainty beyond “we are special.”
Of course, whether the sense of certainty is based on true (realized or subconscious) evidence of outlier-ship, or just a desperate rationalization/denial of deeper doubts, only history can tell.
But the point is, as in the stock market, private information can give you some control over what seems like a pretty random process in the aggregate.
A much simpler and clearer example is in people's reactions to life-expectancy statistics. On the face of it predicting you will live to be a 100 when average life expectancy is 80 seems like foolish denial of the dynamics of mortality. But in fact somebody old enough to make such a statement ALREADY has a private expectation of living beyond 80, since the aggregate stats reflect people who have died before the person in question. The conditional probability, based on current state (and private knowledge) is different from the random sample probability.
But I am nitpicking. Overall, a nice argument and conceptualization here. I like the phrase 'ego dilemma' and there are definitely cases when the sense of certainty is completely unfounded and unjustifiable. There ARE people who think they'll live forever.
August 17th, 2009 at 6:30 pm (#)
Venkat: While this degree of analysis is interesting, it's ultimately unimportant to the question. All you need to do is observe that some people are wrong. They estimate their probability of getting a divorce as low and it turns out to be high. Now, imagine you could travel back in time. No matter what justifications they can offer up, the ultimate ground truth is that they were wrong.
August 17th, 2009 at 6:34 pm (#)
A related question is why there seem to be so few evil geniuses among existing conspiracies, like national security agencies, organized crime, militaries, “terrorists” etc.
They can afford to hire geniuses. They have goals that are recognized as “evil” by many people outside their organization. They don't have that many moral qualms – they've all been known to kill random people if it suited their interests. So why don't they use evil geniuses more?
Or perhaps they do, except they're so good it almost always stays secret. For example if CIA was responsible for protests in Iran, that would be an evil genius success, and they would obviously not want to talk about it.
I think the problem is open.
August 17th, 2009 at 6:41 pm (#)
How about “No, because courts tend to ignore prenups, especially when children are involved”. In UK for example they're considered completely non-binding. Most other countries consider them only partially binding, and it's eventually up to the judge.
Here are the facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenuptial_agreement
August 17th, 2009 at 6:48 pm (#)
In a small scale marketing campaign, doubling the exposure will double the results for the same conversion ratio, thus, you should be focused on generating leads. It's only for saturation campaigns that the conversion ratio becomes important because there's no other way to increase hits.
If spam senders were economically rational actors, then they would either try and generate more leads or improve their emails depending on whichever has the largest hit/effort ratio. That they never seem to improve their emails means that either generating more leads is an incredibly effective way of generating hits, spam conversion rates are incredibly insensitive to content or spammers are not economically rational actors.
Of the three, the last seems the less absurd.
August 17th, 2009 at 6:50 pm (#)
I don't think they being overly competent is the correct explanation. It strikes me as far beyond the capabilities of any organization to pull that off consistently.
I think your observation is an interesting avenue of speculation and I suspect the correct answer has to do with one or more of your assumptions not being valid.
One thing to consider is that almost no organization regards *themselves* as evil. Terrorists think of themselves as freedom fighters, security agents think of themselves as patriots.
August 17th, 2009 at 7:00 pm (#)
That's a valid, if cynical reaction
August 17th, 2009 at 7:29 pm (#)
Check kernel mailing list every now and then – gcc has plenty of bugs. I was bitten by one ages ago too, something related to signedness and long longs, I don't remember the specifics any more.
Many of gcc bugs are things that are underspecified in C standard, but just because C standard allows you to make a compliant compiler that makes every single real world program incorrect doesn't make it not-a-bug.
Standard libraries for C and Java tend to have few bugs because they're so tiny. Standard and semi-standard libraries for Ruby, Python, or Perl tend to be filled with bugs because they do so much.
At some point you need to give up this belief.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:50 pm (#)
Do you plan to give money to charity for your comment too ?
Anyway, I think I came across the blog while searching for something about Facebook. The design was nice, and the content was interesting so I added it to my feed reader (yeah, incidentally that got rid of the design).
August 18th, 2009 at 6:35 pm (#)
Yup, I'm priming the pot so to speak.
August 19th, 2009 at 11:33 am (#)
how I came here? this was a classical hyperlink thing of old-fashioned web …
I read your comment here:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/08/16/the-tragic...
so links in comments do pay
Concerning the blogging dilemma (anyone out there?) this reminds me of a good point I read yesterday: “our attention is spread so thin these days”
quote concerning twitter use:
“It [twitter] appeals to the reptilian part of the brain, I think. It’s an alpha male thing, having followers. When you’re broadcasting, you get to think people are paying attention, and who doesn’t like attention? But our attention is spread so thin these days that the portion devoted to something as minor as a tweet may as well be none at all. Broadcasting may console the ego, but it’s false consolation. What it is a surrogate for (meaningful attention) can’t be gotten that way.”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/why-i-dont...
What a provoking topic! 531 Comments there up to now!!!
Solution? Realize that there is a tiny group of alphas. Seek your equilibrium in tweeting and blogging, adjust from time to time. E.g. I produce less blog posts than in the past, esp. when very busy with projects – but I don't let my blog die, why should I?
http://blog.futurefacts.net/
August 19th, 2009 at 3:38 pm (#)
I actually do have an idea, which will make ton of money but I can't talk about it.
August 21st, 2009 at 8:14 am (#)
Hi, I'm Jason, and I'm from the internet.
I found the blog because you pointed me here, as I'm a friend of yours in real life. I read it partly for that reason – I like seeing what my friends are up to, intellectually, and I imagine that they want me to be part of that conversation. Partly it's also because your blog gives me a window into a world I don't usually take part in – the whole design-space, HCI thing – and I like the occasional culture shock that comes with that.
I'd like you to donate my 25c here: http://www.pkdcure.org/. Though it's worth mentioning publicly, as I did in person, that 25c is a bit crap. Small change, as it were. Hell, you did $20 a day you missed for your 30 Day Experiment; I can see that comments here might be worth less than that, but only a quarter? That's half a game of pool right there.
August 23rd, 2009 at 1:30 pm (#)
Hi Hang. I came to your blog for the first time back in June when you wrote about “The killer app for iPhone 3GS”. I was doing some research for this year's Ars Electronica symposium, which I am co-curating with Chinese blogger Isaac Mao. I also agree that statistics should be the foundation of math education (I hate it when journalists use statistics incorrectly in their reporting) and I related to a lot of what you wrote in “The no obnoxious rich people paradox.” So I've stayed subscribed. The funny thing is, you're one of the few blogs I follow that I don't know how to classify. I have you in my “technology” folder right now, but you write about much more than just tech. Which is good – I enjoy the diversity of thought.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:31 am (#)
Great info…thanks for the post. Came across a site which had some pretty cool wallpapers.
http://www.iphonewallpaperbabes.com
August 25th, 2009 at 1:57 am (#)
Does the format yourMailId+sent@gmail.com work with the sent folder? It is a standard trick to send mail to any other folder.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:59 pm (#)
Hi oso, it's an enormous compliment to me that you don't know how to classify this blog. Part of the reason for starting it was because I couldn't find this type of blog out there anywhere.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:57 am (#)
[...] downright paradoxical. A colleague of mine deems this the “no evil geniuses paradox” and does a good job of defining it. Slate did a ten-part series offering that many theories as to why the US has suffered no [...]
August 30th, 2009 at 9:11 pm (#)
[...] mentioned previously that the reason this company is named Bumblebee Labs is from a term I coined: A bumblebee is an [...]
August 31st, 2009 at 9:37 pm (#)
I was reading an article called The Lazy Evil Genius that was submitted to the Philosophy Reddit which linked to your “No Evil Geniuses Theory”. Now I'm reading through your 30 day experiment posts and subscribed to your RSS feed. =)
-Budro
September 10th, 2009 at 3:50 pm (#)
[...] Evil Geniuses are so rare that it’s still surprising when one actually surfaces. In this case, the plot is so deviously brilliant I can’t do anything but heartily applaud it. I’ll let The Guardian take over from here: The women were led to believe they were being filmed for a Big Brother-type television programme, according to the Dogan news agency and other news reports. Instead, their naked images were sold on the internet by their captors. [...]
September 11th, 2009 at 12:34 am (#)
I completely disagree…this wasn't a particularly ingenious scheme, and it certainly doesn't deserve hearty applause. It was exploitative and cruel (and certainly evil), but ultimately it was just a garden-variety con job.
Person or group A tells person or group B something that B wants to believe but which turns out to be false in a way that is non-obvious to B. A uses this falsehood to exploit B for profit. By the time the falsehood is evident, A is nowhere to be found.
Not only was it not a genius scheme, but it failed. A was discovered before the escape could be made.
September 15th, 2009 at 4:45 pm (#)
Mitnick?
September 21st, 2009 at 10:28 am (#)
test
September 30th, 2009 at 3:03 pm (#)
So a long pleasant and satisfying life vs. a short, painful lonely life? Is that really a choice?
October 1st, 2009 at 12:30 am (#)
Wow, heavy topic. This has been on my mind a lot as of late which has me doubting my trend towards the second option. Granted you only itemized the extremes. Based on how you phrased that second option, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would take that path. The question is how realistic is it to have your cake and eat it too?
Which would you choose?
October 1st, 2009 at 7:06 pm (#)
Nice try, but your argument fails. When you say “When you dismiss all Gods, you are claiming that there is no religious experience to require explanations for,” you fail to understand the basic scientific facts about religious experience. Religious experience is a special, complex event in human brains. It's real and atheism doesn't entail denying it. The god experience is distinct from god concepts or explanations for that experience. You can consult Michael Persinger's book “Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs” for a brilliant, clear elaboration on this distinction.
I'm an atheist but it's only a matter of semantics whether I believe that no gods exist or I believe that every god exists because the true nature of god is a concept in at least one person's brain, and concepts are real, physical processes that exist as much as photosynthesis or rainstorms. I like to say that I believe in every god that anyone has ever believed in.
October 5th, 2009 at 7:34 am (#)
Installing faux wood blinds is also not a problem blind date uncensored because you can do it yourself. You should first choose whether you're going to put the brackets in or out of your window.
October 14th, 2009 at 6:54 pm (#)
I don't quite understand the issue here.
If the question at hand wouldn't be solved any better by an uninterested party who has all of the information that the person involved, then this has nothing to do with ego. It's called “the not having all the information dilemma”.
I would presume that we are talking about a case where your ability to process the information and make a rational decision is warped because of the fact that you strongly desire a certain outcome. It's like any situation where a strong emotion destroys our logical decision making process. Just observe how any depressed person comes to the logical conclusion that “it's not worth it and it wont work” and after taking his meds comes to the logical conclusion that “it is worth it and it will work”.
The solution is rather simple and quick, but it takes 2 minutes of hard work. Close your eyes and imagine that you are an outside observer looking at yourself, who knows all the information you know, but isn't affected at all by this decision. Imagine looking through the observer eyes, hearing through his ears, and feeling the observers emotions (curiosity, disinterest, and any other observer emotion you can think up). Really get into it, take a full minute to imagine the scene. THEN have a go at the decision.
This process, which I call the “neutral observer decision”, is one that I teach to all of my clients and is one that works very very well. Teaching it to yourself is even easier because there is less of a temptation to be dishonest as to appear that you didn't make a mistake.
If after all this you don't have a clear solution, it simply means that you lack enough information. This has nothing to do with ego at all.
Joe
October 15th, 2009 at 9:38 am (#)
Joe: If you are able to teach the neutral observer decision to people easily, I'm impressed. Often, what happens is that people will accept the logic of the neutral observer decision intellectually but then arbitrarily make the decision that the neutral observer is wrong.
Try telling a Christian that there exists equally devoted believers of a mutually contradictory faith. Every time I've done it, they get to a certain point of reasoning before defaulting back to “they must be wrong and I must be right because I'm special”.
But the dilemma doesn't come from not being able to apply the neutral observer decision, the dilemma comes from not knowing when it applies. Sometimes, the neutral observer is wrong, you genuinely are special and you should believe in your specialness. It's being able to distinguish these instances from when your mind is fooling itself that is the dilemma.
October 15th, 2009 at 6:10 pm (#)
You make 2 points.
1. People often times aren't interested in knowing the truth and in those cases the observer position doesn't help them.
2. Sometimes there isn't enough information to make the correct decision, and even with all the information at hand there is no proof to your specialness even though you are special.
Here are my responses.
1. I was responding to the part of your post where you said that knowing about the dilemma doesn't help you even if you want to be helped. It is in those cases where I'm offering a solution (as in the cases of my clients, they want to change what isn't working in their life).
2. This problem has nothing to do with the ego. It is simply a case of not enough information. The same issue would come up when deciding on which route to take to work where you have incomplete information. As I said in my original response
“If the question at hand wouldn't be solved any better by an uninterested party who has all of the information that the person involved, then this has nothing to do with ego. It's called “the not having all the information dilemma”.”
You also said “If you are able to teach the neutral observer decision to people easily, I'm impressed. Often, what happens is that people will accept the logic of the neutral observer decision intellectually but then arbitrarily make the decision that the neutral observer is wrong.”
Here lies the secret of the neutral observer position. It's not an intellectual exercise! It's an exercise of imagination, subjective experience, and emotion. We don't “prove” anything, we explore perceptions for a different emotional standpoint. When done as an imagination game it is very very powerful and very very effective.
Use the exact words and formula I gave for creating a powerful experience. The exact words I use have been carefully refined after working with it many many times.
Joe
December 4th, 2009 at 3:44 pm (#)
“Mask” is the operative word here. Software is very complicated, and we use abstraction to hide things, in the hopes that we can create more complicated things without screwing them up.
Programming is all about *hiding* stuff. There is so much that is invisible. While debugging a program, you are generally looking at a tiny tiny portion of it, like scanning a stadium with a flashlight.
Every programmer of a certain age knows that software was more stable years ago, because it was smaller. As it has gotten bigger, it's gotten less stable. We're still surprised by this because we are employing increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques, but apparently they can't possibly keep up with the problems caused by size.
Larger programs mean more things are hidden. Code rot is almost never discovered early. Programmers who cause code rot are almost never discovered early.
I can't account for the FizzBuzz effect at all, but it's been a while since I was in school so I really have no idea what goes on there; all I know is that it has got to be really different than it was when I was in school.
December 9th, 2009 at 7:37 pm (#)
Great analysis of an emerging decentralized workforce. This site has some inspiring stories and windows into the lives of people who Turk for a living.
December 10th, 2009 at 6:15 pm (#)
Hi, I discovered your blog through you comment on Ribbon Farm. Really enjoying your posts, esp the Mech Turk analysis and the Dunning Kruger doubleckick. On this Facebook credits thing, Dan Arielly covers (in Predictably Irrational) what happens when we move a transaction from a social norm into a market norm (e.g. trying to offer to pay your mom-in-law for a Thanksgiving Turkey, and irking her by forcing her to evaluate your evaluation of her social gift to you), and how this permanently destroys some of the altruism innate in friendly interactions (which you call “the ambiguity that keeps friendships running smoothly).
This is a very interesting move by Fbook, and could be parlayed into all kinds of micropayments, virtual goods, gifts and other “materialistic” status markers” that crystallize the net worth of someone's social network.
Nice blog – provocative, and well written. Keep them coming
December 15th, 2009 at 8:53 am (#)
I've stopped following your blog because of this misogynistic post.
December 15th, 2009 at 9:03 am (#)
Figuring Shit Out has a fairly open guest post policy. This was not written or endorsed by any of the bloggers you've come to know and love at FSO, nor did I receive approval before posting it.
December 15th, 2009 at 9:25 pm (#)
This is total and utter crap. The points are completely unsubstantiated, trivially disproven, and overtly offensive. I would be ashamed to call the person who wrote this a friend, let alone to feature it on anything my name was associated with. Honestly, the only thing that speaks well of the author is the fact that he had the good sense to not associate his name with it. Unfortunately the same can't be said for you.
I would say it's not that women don't understand friendship, it's that the author does not understand women. With an attitude like this, he is unlikely to have a chance to remedy this situation.
December 15th, 2009 at 11:53 pm (#)
It feels like the author just had the internet equivalent of a temper tantrum. Hope it's all out of your system dude.
Just relax and forget about whoever it was that made you feel this way – there are plenty of other fish in the sea waiting to step on your balls and call you out for the D-bag that you are.
December 16th, 2009 at 12:57 am (#)
wow- what a bitter bitter little man who wrote this, who has no idea the way the world works.
This whole post made me a little sad for the author.
December 16th, 2009 at 4:19 pm (#)
[...] few days ago, I allowed a friend of mine to post a guest post titled Why women don’t understand friendship. So far, the reactions to the piece have been universally negative with “bitter”, [...]
December 16th, 2009 at 10:26 pm (#)
I'll pick the low hanging fruit.
So, you say women can't have friendships, only acquaintances. You don't substantiate the difference well, nor do you provide evidence for this claim.
You argue women don't have an adequate definition of friendship, without clearly offering your own definition, or providing any evidence suggesting it's anything other that your own arbitrary claim.
You make some dramatic claims about male and female behaviour (sabotage, dating behavior) that firstly, don't seem at all universal, and secondly, seem particularly misogynistic. Certainly, if I knew for certain who you were, I'd now have a strong motivation for sabotaging your attempts to interact with women I know.
Overall, you're just ranting. There's nothing here that counts as evidence beyond personal anecdote, and obviously, that doesn't cut it. You make a bunch of categorical claims, never once providing evidence for them. Your last sentence, for example – I can think of 20 men who'd probably disagree.
Basically, you're just making a lot of this shit up. Sounds like you have a very poor opinion of women, either because you've had no success, or you've had too much success in manipulative ways.
This reads to me like “I'm special. I have a special relationship with people I like. Women aren't special, so they can't have special relationships, just a pale approximation of them”.
Hang – I your open guest policy just lost you 80-90% of your blog's credibility.
December 18th, 2009 at 10:18 pm (#)
Well, I definitely applaud the re-examination of heresies. But, really, that one's not new, nor was there anything much in there that's not already been hashed out in depth by men's rights activists on the one hand, and alpha male dating advisors on the other.
Sorry, that _was_ a bad argument. It'd be interesting to hear a more nuanced and detailed discussion on the topic, but that wasn't it. Sure, 'heresies must be aired out', but if that's the best showing there is for this particular one, then self-editing is in order. Next time, pare away the easy criticisms first before showing it to people, and you might get more discussion of the sort you're looking for.
December 27th, 2009 at 2:50 pm (#)
I think the point here is that, as the argument says, people aren't born with religious beliefs until they are exposed to them and often indoctrinated. What you are debating about, by focusing on the definition of atheism, is semantics and deflates the entire point of the born atheist argument.
Consider, instead, that in the absence religious doctrine the person then has the capacity to make an intelligent decision about not believing in God. Thus, by being born in a state of tabula rasa, the individual can later become atheist naturally. The 'born atheist' argument is metaphorical for the newborn in that it empowers atheism when children are raised without indoctrination.
December 27th, 2009 at 6:38 pm (#)
This is where I disagree with you on a factual basis. People born with an absense of religious doctrine don't become atheists, they become animists. They invent weather gods & tree spirits rather than nothing.
January 4th, 2010 at 10:13 pm (#)
Heresy is defined (in non-religious terms) as a belief or idea which is in opposition to established views, and I agree that it is an important prerequisite to the free exchange of ideas. However, “Why women don't understand friendship” wasn't heresy, it was bordering hate speech, and to lump it under the term heresy to be able to claim freedom of speech is wrong and lazy.
Whenever the most vile, disturbing, and offensive “arguments” are being made, it is put under the banner of free speech. It's how religious nuts get away with gay bashing and worse. No one seems to understand that that freedom comes with huge responsibilities. It's why you can't publicly deny the holocaust, or incite hate or violence.
Get your head out of your ass.
January 4th, 2010 at 11:30 pm (#)
I think Hang's goal in allowing this stems from his philosophy that it is always better _in the long run_ to consider all ideas than to avoid considering them. For example, if someone were to write an essay saying blacks had lower IQs, some would argue that the essay is is too dangerous to exist, and really shouldn't be published until the evidence is overwhelming, if ever. Until then, it's hate speech. I would probably agree with that. As far as dehumanizing half the population by claiming it’s unable to feel the most basic forms of human connection, yeah, the essay sort of is hate speech, even by my standards.
Had you stopped there, I would’ve agreed with you. But you brought up an argument that defeats our point of view and affirms Hang’s. You mentioned Holocaust denial. I don’t think any reasonable person would argue the Holocaust didn’t historically happen, not even Ahmadinejad. What he argued was that it became a myth. A myth isn’t necessarily true or false, it’s just a story used by a people to explain their place in the world. By labeling any criticism of the state of Israel hate speech, political discourse is very effectively silenced, and we all watch in horror as Israel commits atrocities. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nat...)
Hate speech against women or gays or Jews is clearly undesirable in my worldview, and I’d like to see it silenced whenever destructive, perhaps even the women-friendship essay should be deleted for that reason, but apparently Hang takes a different view. He would say it’s too dangerous to the free exchange of ideas to classify them as too dangerous to consider. Certainly some are, but here’s the thing. You misinterpreted and misclassified criticism of Zionism as hate speech, and it is this sort of self-imposed and socially mediated blinding that lets Israel get away with so much. If you missed the mark in making a simple list of what should be hate speech, perhaps there is something to Hang’s philosophy that all ideas need to be fully investigated and considered, no matter how temporarily unpleasant, so that we may be given the opportunity to truly consider whether they are reflective of reality or hateful nonsense.
January 5th, 2010 at 10:11 am (#)
Freedom of speech is only freedom if it applies to that which is “vile, disturbing, and offensive”. Unlike in Germany, it is perfectly legal to deny the holocaust in the US and I will defend that right. Holocaust denial should not go away because it's outside of the bounds of acceptable discourse, holocaust denial should go away because it's a stupid argument.
I still stand by what I say but I respect that you differ in your opinion.
January 15th, 2010 at 4:54 pm (#)
“Raising the minimum wage decreases well being [...] These are all well established parts of the mainstream economics canon and they are all, by and large, true.”
Oh, here's a good one because it's so obviously false. This would only be true if demand for low level labour was highly elastic, while in fact it's highly inelastic – so effect of increased wages for the working poor overwhelms any effects of decreased employment. And all research shows no statistically significant effects of minimum wage on employment.
And yet in spite of both theory and practice supporting minimum wage, economists keep claiming it's a horrible idea.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:26 pm (#)
Do you have a cite that it's highly inelastic? The relentless quest for ever cheaper labor overseas and the minute sensitivities to currency fluctuations indicate that manufacturing wages at least are highly elastic. It could be that the bulk of highly elastic wages has already been globalized so raising the minimum wage in any one country will do next to nothing since supply will simply shift to another.
A situation peculiar to America is that the minimum wage is now so low that it applies to very few people. Even Walmart employees are paid close to two times minimum wage.
When I say by and large true, I mean only in the first approximation sense. There's plenty of room to quibble around the margins and the exceptions may end up outnumbering the non-exceptions in everyday life. But on a gross scale, I'm pretty confident that raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour (adjusted for inflation) is never going to be a smart economic idea.
January 15th, 2010 at 6:03 pm (#)
Just because overdoing something would be a bad idea doesn't mean doing reasonable amounts of it would be too.
Almost all lowest-paid jobs are in services already, not manufacturing – unskilled manufacturing has already been shipped abroad, as has been all services which could be effectively automated. It will keep happening regardless of minimum wage levels.
Wikipedia has links to relevant research. In multiple studies 10-20% increases in minimum wage resulted it 0-3% decreases in teenage employment (a proxy for unskilled labour). Reduction would have to be >10% for 10% increase in wages for total incomes of that group to be negatively affected. As such jobs are rarely permanent, so times of unemployment are generally distributed among all working poor, it makes sense to simply consider total income instead of employment status. Employment effects are simply nowhere near approaching income effects.
Another unrelated effect which is strangely always ignored in this discussion is government aid for the working poor, which effectively constitutes subsidies for badly paid jobs, increasing taxes and creating disincentives for the rest of the economy. Is it a better idea to tax McDonalds extra and pay its employees welfare; make them increase their wages; or tax everyone else to pay for their employees? The answer seems fairly obvious.
By the way Denmark has $20 hourly minimum wage (all right, it's just $12 PPP), and much lower unemployment than EU average.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:47 pm (#)
Yeah, believing in a god is signifcantly more stupid than believing in no god, you sure got that one right.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:50 pm (#)
''If I went on about how Satan buried those fossils as a test of my faith, you could safely label me a-dinosaur as I’ve made an active assertion about how the world could be without dinosaurs.''
January 16th, 2010 at 7:50 pm (#)
`''If I went on about how Satan buried those fossils as a test of my faith, you could safely label me a-dinosaur as I’ve made an active assertion about how the world could be without dinosaurs.''
Obvious troll is obvious.
January 17th, 2010 at 3:19 am (#)
You realize I'm atheist right?
January 17th, 2010 at 3:20 am (#)
You realize I'm atheist right?
January 17th, 2010 at 9:34 am (#)
I dunno, I found some bits of it interesting but it wasn't clear where you were going with the story.
February 8th, 2010 at 8:16 am (#)
Interesting, both the essay and the comments. My thoughts about the essay are critical, about the comments, brutal.
First, there is some real merit to the overall premise that women lack the same bonding abilities as men, but I don't think they were particularly well articulated by the author. Rather I should say the author could have been more succinct., and I think there were points made that were quite erroneous. e.g. the inference that women are just as capable of being civilizations architects. They aren't. It boils down to a lack of aptitude in hard science overall, and a lack of physical capability.
Oh, and for the sensitively enlightened, that doesn't infer that women could not form a civilized society, but that they collectively could not compete with men in this area very well.
Onward though, here were other points not well supported.
The foraging and sustenance hypothesis is unsupportable. We don't know enough about neolithic society to know which sex provided the most food. Nothing empirical anyway.
There are a couple of other points I disagree with, but don't feel the need to belabor it. I do think, unlike some of those who commented here, that the writing was pretty good. He strains the reader at times by not better supporting points, but the flow was sustained and his style was pretty engaging at points. I'd say a B- on the writing with the potential of an A+ with practice.
What I found most amusing was the people who commented here. Despite the fact that he wrote rather dispassionately (too dispassionately to be honest) I see a lot of charges of misogyny and ranting in the comment section. The first responder stops following the blog over it.
When I read that, my first thought was “What a pansy.”
Though it could have been better, and probably will with this writer gaining some experience, I didn't detect a trace of rage or hatred. Or at least I didn't till I read through the comments.
And interestingly, these comments support the authors idea of males being disposable even better than he did in the article. It is pretty much the same in a lot of places. If you identify a negative and generalize it toward women, all rhyme and reason flies out the window., supplanted by phony righteous indignation for offenses simply imagined.
A university dean can, and has, lost his job because he claimed that women do not have the mathematic aptitude that men do. It did matter in the least that he was 100% correct. He got fired for telling a truth that offended modern sensibilities, or rather a lack of them.
And as I looked at the bigotry and rage and haughtiness that blazed through the comments to this piece, I was reminded that we are probably getting worse about this instead of better.
February 10th, 2010 at 7:31 pm (#)
There's a great Scientific American article about Pop Evolutionary Psychology, which explains the history of the field, and why it's generally unaccepted among the critical scientific community.
The author doesn't substantiate any claims – so I'll just say – “what's appears accurate to your experience, isn't necessarily true. accurate is not true. perception turns the world, and it's a big one. good luck.”
February 12th, 2010 at 9:39 am (#)
[...] full post on Hacker News If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it! Tagged with: Guerrilla [...]
February 12th, 2010 at 11:51 am (#)
[...] Kathrin Passig hat heute eine Usability-Test-Empfehlung rumgeschickt, nämlich die [hier], deren zentraler Bestandteil betrunkene Barbesucher sind, weil die am besten [...]
February 12th, 2010 at 4:40 pm (#)
Well it may seem like $5 test but actually if you count the time you spend for your beer and your time in a pub it may prove to be a bit more expensive
But nevertheless can be fun
You can also use some free tools available to test your UI – e.g. http://www.usabilitytest.com
February 12th, 2010 at 4:40 pm (#)
Well it may seem like $5 test but actually if you count the time you spend for your beer and your time in a pub it may prove to be a bit more expensive
But nevertheless can be fun
You can also use some free tools available to test your UI – e.g. http://www.usabilitytest.com
February 12th, 2010 at 5:27 pm (#)
I've been doing this for years, only on enterprise apps, using participants of office parties. It really does work wonders for your interface.
February 12th, 2010 at 5:49 pm (#)
genius.
February 12th, 2010 at 5:49 pm (#)
genius.
February 12th, 2010 at 6:20 pm (#)
Brilliant, thanks for sharing. I was going to say, maybe the $5 beer reward should be given up front to increase the subject's intoxication level .. haha
February 12th, 2010 at 6:29 pm (#)
Freakin brilliant. I can't wait to do this.
February 12th, 2010 at 7:34 pm (#)
This would work for some projects, but breaks the number 1 rule of usability studies. Make sure you carefully qualify the people you are testing it with to make sure they are in your target audience/demographic.
I'll have to try this out at some point when I'm testing something rather generic, like a blog design.
February 12th, 2010 at 7:34 pm (#)
This would work for some projects, but breaks the number 1 rule of usability studies. Make sure you carefully qualify the people you are testing it with to make sure they are in your target audience/demographic.
I'll have to try this out at some point when I'm testing something rather generic, like a blog design.
February 12th, 2010 at 7:34 pm (#)
This would work for some projects, but breaks the number 1 rule of usability studies. Make sure you carefully qualify the people you are testing it with to make sure they are in your target audience/demographic.
I'll have to try this out at some point when I'm testing something rather generic, like a blog design.
February 12th, 2010 at 7:43 pm (#)
“Users aren’t so much unintelligent as they are distracted and indifferent”
I've seen a bunch of articles white knighting for “the users” like this recently, but I'm not buying it. They are unintelligent. They are idiots. To actually get confused by that page requires a staggering lack of awareness and ability to think.
In the opening paragraph you say it is condescending and wrong to “think stupid” to make your UI more accessible. How different is it if you “think like a drunk, distracted, and/or indifferent person?” It's the same exact thing, you've just renamed it something less condescending.
Hmm, a user sitting there with glazed over eyes, so distracted and indifferent to the screen he is using that he can't even identify one of 800 clues that this isn't the facebook login page, somehow bypassing all of that to find the comments section and hammer out some AOL-speak…sounds like an idiot to me. Nothing against the author of this post, I just think we should accept the fact that many people are not smart (not entirely their fault, no doubt, but that's how it is).
February 12th, 2010 at 9:56 pm (#)
This is a great approach thanks for sharing it.
February 13th, 2010 at 7:49 am (#)
James: Of course there are unintelligent users, I'm not denying that. The point I'm trying to make is there are also many smart people who end up doing stupid looking things on your application because they're distracted & indifferent.
The difference between thinking of users as stupid vs thinking of them as distracted & indifferent comes down to one of respect. Too often, I'm talking to developers who have a subtle vein of condescension towards any suggestion I have simplify an interface because their mental image of the users who are affected by this issue is that they're drooling idiots.
Once I hammer it into their heads that instead who they're dealing with is capable people, just like them, who simply have other things going on in their lives, the tone of the conversation changes dramatically.
February 13th, 2010 at 8:29 am (#)
Thanks for this — I've always been uncomfortable with the artificial environment of lab-based usability evaluations and this is an interesting idea to try out
February 13th, 2010 at 9:13 am (#)
Quite like this topic, of-course no-one in their 'right' mind would go for option two, yet the world has known many great artist, who delivered extreme value and joy to the world but felt forced to take their live on a young age. For me in a way they are statistical exceptions, people who have a terrible live and find in stimulating to create great art. The sad story ofcourse is that many people end up in choice two, but never achieve anything.
Now for some good news, there is quite a handful of legendary designers, architects, businessmen who's both contributed to society And had a relatively happy life. The trick is probably to stay away from the arts.
February 13th, 2010 at 10:32 am (#)
So the interesting thing I've noticed since asking this question is that the answer skews about 60/40 in favor of option 1 but many people who pick option 1 find it unimaginable that anyone would pick option 2.
It reveals an interesting disconnect in world view between two very different value systems which I'm planning to explore in a later post.
February 13th, 2010 at 10:50 am (#)
I don't think that option two can be picked given the free choice. I think people who go for option two are 'created'. To go for option two you need an internal motivation that goes beyond rationality and also against basic human needs such as love, safety and care. I think that self-doubt is a key ingredient, and a decent amount of suffering also helps. You could probably do some statistical research by finding a list of the 50 greatest authors of the 20th century and the way they've come to an end.
Maybe you can also look at motivation. What motivates some to go for option one is not that hard, it's just always doing the things that 'society' set's out to be the right things to do. But if you could ever find out what motivates group two, than we could revolutionize the world. If you have some time you could read outliers by Malcom Gladwell he discusses some of these points.
My favourite theory is that 4 years Siberia make you a better writer, or the other infamous quote “Miserable childhood leads to royalties”
February 13th, 2010 at 11:37 am (#)
Part of the reason I started asking this was to gather further data and I don't yet have enough to make a definitive claim but I humbly submit that your claim is factually wrong.
I would wager that there are societies in which option 2 is overwhelmingly preferred to option one, most notably those from developing worlds and eastern cultures. In my own empirical experience, the skew is towards option 1 but not by much at all.
As far as I personally go, every time I read option 1, it fills me with a sort nameless dread. There's something so futile, so insignificant about that kind of life. It reminds me of a placid cow, kept happy, dumb & fed until it is one day slaughtered.
February 13th, 2010 at 11:46 am (#)
thanks for your comment.
Don't you think that the societies of which you speak that prefer option two, that option is preferred because of economical and basic survival instinct. But indeed it's an interesting idea that in a society where 'the good life' of option one is so easily available, many people keep on searching for a deeper meaning to contribute.
As I was thinking, do you think it's useful to split off the great artists from the great professionals? Judging by the suicide rates, it takes a lot more to be a great artist than it takes to be a great professional. And maybe you could be more clear on how great the contribution is to society. Are we talking here about a contribution so great that only one in a million brings it, or more on the scale of 1 in 1000, or if you claim that it's the favourite career path for entire societies 1 in 2?
February 13th, 2010 at 12:14 pm (#)
The best way to get into the right mindset is to stop focusing on what's so *different* about other cultures and instead imagine what about your own culture you would have to consider weird to “get it”.
I think one big part of what it is is an indifference to suffering. In the US & the west, there's an obsessive focus on happiness and contentment. The “good” life is one which is full of love and free from pain.
In eastern culture, suffering seems to be taken as just a natural part of life & not really something that should be escaped from. The Chinese gaokao system for university entrance exams is a brutal misery and a good example of this. This is not a system for elites or only one type of person, it's broad based in society.
When I figure out a better way of explaining it, I'll write a seperate blog post but this is the best I have off the top of my head.
February 13th, 2010 at 1:10 pm (#)
Maybe you could restate the question as 'What is the price you are willing to pay to achieve great things” Would you give up your house, your family, your friends, your health.
Second; what is a great achievement? Is that health and safety for your family, and industrial breakthrough, enormous wealth, the best book ever written? (And how great is a great achievement)
And third what motivates you to strive for such an achievement. A miserable childhood, a life in poverty and hunger or a hunger for recognition.
If you are right, than depending on in which culture you ask these questions the answer would vary.
Thus-far I'm most familiar with the western approach, and only vaguely familiar with the Russian notion of constant suffering. I'll do my best to understand more of those
February 13th, 2010 at 11:02 am (#)
[...] The $5 Guerrilla User Test – BumbleBeeLabs [...]
February 13th, 2010 at 11:08 am (#)
[...] The $5 Guerrilla User Test [...]
February 13th, 2010 at 4:24 pm (#)
Implicit in your rephrasing of the question is the assumption that option 1 is the normative one. I'll say it again: There are some days where I wake up and feel a deep yearning to live life like option 1, there are other days I wake up and the thought fills me with horror. If the devil showed up on those days and told me that was how my life would turn out, I would rather not to have lived at all than to live as a prolonged corpse, suffocating in happiness. It's this deep ambivalence that I think you're failing to appreciate.
February 13th, 2010 at 4:59 pm (#)
Nil novus sub soli.
February 13th, 2010 at 5:24 pm (#)
Maybe my point is that very likely the devil will never show up, and you will just mildly suffer like everyone else.
Dostoevsky has a nice paragraph on this topic: “One of these luckless men…is the guardian angel of his family, maintains by his labour outsiders as well as his own kindred, and yet can never be at rest all of his life! The thought that he has so well fulfilled his duties is no comfort or consolation to him; on the contrary, it irritates him. 'This is what I've wasted all my life on,' he says; 'this is what has fettered me, hand and foot; this is what has hindered me from doing something great! Had it not been for this, I should certainly have discovered — gunpowder or America, I don't know precisely what, but I would certainly have discovered it!' What is most characteristic of these gentlemen is that they can never find out for certain what it is they are destined to discover and what they are within an ace of discovering. But their sufferings, their longings for what was to be discovered, would have sufficed for a Columbus or a Galileo.”
(Part IV, Chapter 1, page 433)
February 13th, 2010 at 5:33 pm (#)
It's unscientific. It's creative. It's scrappy. I think I like it.
(Though Josh Walsh has a good point about selecting the proper test group)
February 14th, 2010 at 4:29 am (#)
At least as of 3.0, the iPhone clock does adjust its time zone setting automatically. I don't know if it uses GPS location services or if it somehow gets the information from the GSM network, but it does it.
Likewise, OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) now has a Location Services feature built-in (probably based on WiFi access points) and will offer to use it to automatically determine the appropriate time zone.
February 14th, 2010 at 5:33 pm (#)
[...] The $5 Guerrilla User Test « Bumblebee Labs Blog (tags: testing ux psychology) [...]
February 15th, 2010 at 10:53 am (#)
Sjors: I'm wondering if this post has any resonance with you: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/nov-5th-day-23-... . I just noticed it in my archives just now and it explores some of the same themes from a different perspective.
February 15th, 2010 at 10:00 am (#)
[...] $5 Guerilla User Test A recent blog post from BumbleBee Labs proposed an intriguing method for user testing – bring your laptop into a bar, find someone a [...]
February 15th, 2010 at 8:15 pm (#)
This is one of the most evocative and approachable visualizations and descriptions of simulated annealing I've encountered.
Your discussion of the costs of [in]vested interests reminded me of an article by John Gourville in the June 2006 issue of HBR, Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption, in which he describes how “loss aversion”, the “endowment effect” and “status-quo bias” all contribute to our reticence to try (or buy) new things. The upshot: most people have to perceive a potential improvement factor of 3:1 before they are willing to abandon the old for the new.
February 15th, 2010 at 9:06 pm (#)
Hi Joe,
Thanks for the compliment, I was always dissatisfied with descriptions of Simulated Annealing as they made so complicated what was, to me, a blindingly simple concept. I'm glad I managed to convey that simplicity across.
I don't know if I spoke specifically to you about this but, at CHI last year, I made two specific predictions:
1. in 10 years time, 90%+ of all phones in use in the developed world would look recognizably like an iPhone (in the same way 90%+ of all desktop computers look recognizably like an Alto)
2. Apple was too smart to be working on a tablet.
For the last year, I'd been itching to put down on paper what I had been saying out loud but I hadn't been able to find the exact right framing that would make such an argument clear to a mass audience.
This post is laying the foundation for what is to become my argument for why the iPad could be the largest mistake that Apple ever made.
February 15th, 2010 at 9:44 pm (#)
An easier way to get video playing in the background:
Start the video
Hit the home button
Hit the power button
Hit the home button
Double tap the home button
Hit Play
Slide the slider
February 15th, 2010 at 9:44 pm (#)
An easier way to get video playing in the background:
Start the video
Hit the home button
Hit the power button
Hit the home button
Double tap the home button
Hit Play
Slide the slider
February 17th, 2010 at 10:26 pm (#)
love it!
February 18th, 2010 at 7:32 pm (#)
a very subjective issue has been awesomely analyzed. hats off!
February 18th, 2010 at 8:02 pm (#)
I'm curious what inspiration it would take to enroll someone in “hunting for passion”. I suspect it is possible for passion to infect someone, rising from zero passions, to one or more passions, to all-encompassing passion.
February 18th, 2010 at 8:23 pm (#)
Wow, what a fantastic analysis. I'm definitely of the third type and have always found it difficult to focus myself on one interest — I have so many! I “picked” technology as a field to enter after highschool even though I was equally passionate about dozens of other fields. Now I'm transitioning into a nomadc lifestyle and headed to India next month to start a journey of self-exploration, living with only what's on my back.
How do you suggest those of us in the third category express ourselves or explain our seemingly chaotic, unstructured, and unfocused lives to those in the other two?
Thanks for the post! I've added you to my RSS reader.
February 18th, 2010 at 8:44 pm (#)
I don't know what it would take to switch people from one type to another or if this is even possible. I would argue that 90% of this is set through a combination of genetics and strong childhood influences.
February 18th, 2010 at 8:47 pm (#)
I would say exploit the unique advantages of your position to live in the boundary worlds. Make associations between fields that never would have occurred to someone not spanning both. Help people from different fields talk to each other by translating their language & modes of thought to something comprehensible.
At least, that's what I'm trying to do.
February 18th, 2010 at 9:30 pm (#)
Awesome article. Amazing analysis of different passion-types and their interaction. I am definitely the third type. I guess one can tell that after reading my blog
February 18th, 2010 at 11:04 pm (#)
very nice article…. the first time I found me “catalogued” so interestingly (3rd category, too)
> As a result, it’s been interesting but difficult for me to really peer into the minds of
> the other two groups of people.
maybe it's easyer than for the other 2 to peer into them mind of the 3rd… having interest in “all” and in interconnection, maybe there's a deeper interest also in investigating all kinds of human behaviors and the awareness that the biggest mistake is thinking other people are thinking with our kind of thinking…
February 18th, 2010 at 11:54 pm (#)
Wow..this is great post. Makes me think about this topic again. And this comment about connecting seemingly unconnected things is what I kinda been doing a bit… I can't put a finger on that though.. I'm still young and learning about myself.
But what if you are wrong in sense that people don't just have multiple passions, but they have a “theme” they are passionate about. One could be passionate about “Creation”, other about “Evolving” etc. And if you are passionate about creation you can express yourself in either programming, music, graphic art, even a business vision.. That's how I was justifying my multiple passions..
Still, probably not all of them fit under this description..
February 18th, 2010 at 9:31 pm (#)
[...] Three types of passion [...]
February 18th, 2010 at 10:39 pm (#)
[...] the original article [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 1:50 am (#)
People that are passionate about one thing often think that those with a passion for “everything” are annoying because they can lack focus. Teams full of people passionate about everything are often outperformed by teams full of people passionate about nothing (as long as there are enough people passionate about one thing to lead the charge)
February 19th, 2010 at 1:50 am (#)
People that are passionate about one thing often think that those with a passion for “everything” are annoying because they can lack focus. Teams full of people passionate about everything are often outperformed by teams full of people passionate about nothing (as long as there are enough people passionate about one thing to lead the charge)
February 19th, 2010 at 2:10 am (#)
“I think this is one of the more insidious miscommunications that exists because it imposes a subtle form of prejudice and judgement.”
So people passionate about nothing should read this blog post…
February 19th, 2010 at 4:49 am (#)
Most people who are “passionate about everything” still have things which totally bore them. Sports is a pretty common example that I've come across. But if they meet someone who's passionate about sports, they'll still listen to them because it's the passion itself that most interests them.
February 19th, 2010 at 4:51 am (#)
This is a very important point and I thank you for making it. Having a lot of passions isn't always a good thing. When dealing with people like that, they so often want to go off onto tangents and it's hard work to rein them in.
February 19th, 2010 at 5:31 am (#)
Google “Too Many Aptitudes.” Type 3 is the archetypal TMA. The interest in everything, it turns out, comes from a wiring glitch that results in more than the average number of aptitudes. Think about that. Type 3's are “Renaissance” sorts, easily distracted, hyper-curious and effusive. The condition is as much a burden as a gift, as you probably are aware.
February 19th, 2010 at 3:50 am (#)
[...] a comment » Excerpts from a post originally written by Bumblebee Labs, referenced by India Uncut: The world seems to be split into roughly three [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 3:51 am (#)
[...] PDRTJS_settings_55706_post_305 = { "id" : "55706", "unique_id" : "wp-post-305", "title" : "Passion+for+Many+Things", "item_id" : "_post_305", "permalink" : "http%3A%2F%2Faniruddhasblog.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F02%2F19%2Fpassion%2F" } The world seems to be split into roughly three different types of people: Those who have a passion for nothing, those who have a passion for one thing and those who have a passion for everything. This way of categorizing is not to cast a value judgement onto any particular group. My informal observation is that aspects such as intelligence, courage, moral fibre and wisdom seem roughly evenly distributed across all three of these groups although it may initially not seem that way. It’s always difficult trying to describe a group with an insider’s perspective if you’re not an insider but I’m going to give it a try: Read Here [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 10:43 am (#)
I LOVE sports! How can someone not like them???
Anyway, interesting topic, would be nice to see you writing more about it 
February 19th, 2010 at 9:12 am (#)
[...] Nov 5th (day 23): Three types of passion « Figuring Shit Out. 0 [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 3:25 pm (#)
Awestruck!
February 19th, 2010 at 2:55 pm (#)
[...] quote sums up Bumblebee Labs $5 Guerrilla User Test nicely: Drunk people are a pretty accurate mimic of distracted, indifferent [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 6:21 pm (#)
an awesome and a lot of “content” write… this can be nothing other than the truth. I have observed life in a manner I know and I couldn't agree more with these thoughts.
Thanks,
AJ
February 19th, 2010 at 6:55 pm (#)
Thanks for the reference Charlie, very interesting & relevant stuff.
February 19th, 2010 at 10:38 pm (#)
just came across this blog..havent read much..but liked the theory of societies adopting innovation using the paperclip model. ..would like to read such analysis and theories.
good work..
-Naveen
February 20th, 2010 at 2:59 am (#)
What we call adulthood is converting a person passionate about everything to a person passionate about nothing.
February 20th, 2010 at 8:28 am (#)
What an awesome article! Fantastic analysis.
February 20th, 2010 at 3:05 pm (#)
9 comments? What is the conversion rate?
And two new comments within the day, after all this time. Who would have thought? Did someone link in recently?
February 20th, 2010 at 6:06 pm (#)
Wow, simply amazing analysis. It actually gave me a new look towards Life. Couldn't resist referring this one on my blog – http://aniruddhasblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/...
I am indeed the 3rd Category and very much proud about it. And yes, now I can tell people that I am very much focused in Life, but towards many things.
February 20th, 2010 at 8:10 pm (#)
The ego dilemma article – perhaps a case of projection?
February 21st, 2010 at 10:24 am (#)
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February 21st, 2010 at 3:08 pm (#)
Just landed here via a link on http://indiauncut.com/ to read the entire post on three types of passion, which by the way is an awesome post. Looking around to see if I should bookmark this blog for regular read. Haven't decided yet.
Oh and I”m okay with ACLU.
Abdu
http://abdusalaam.blogspot.com
February 21st, 2010 at 3:15 pm (#)
That's a very smart thing to say, which makes me afraid to say anything more.
February 21st, 2010 at 6:17 pm (#)
Thanx for this
Its all about matching enthusiasm (passion)
I am Cat-3, now I need find out how to concentrate
February 22nd, 2010 at 6:34 am (#)
I read about the three kinds of passion from a link that was sent to my mail by a CSR link that i follow. Its a great blog!!
February 24th, 2010 at 12:54 am (#)
[...] The $5 Guerilla User Test http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-5-guerrilla-user-test/ [...]
February 24th, 2010 at 1:24 pm (#)
Hi,
I completely agree with you when you say the User experience is absolutely not the greatest with iPhone (iTunes combined) .. I recently wrote about a dilemma in the interface itself in the primary feature of iPhone (or any phone for that matter) – receiving a call.
link is here http://sharath-sridhar.blogspot.com/2009/03/app...
February 25th, 2010 at 12:31 am (#)
This is such a great point, Hang. Not only does it change the tone of the conversation, but it re-orients the culture of your whole team away from one of 'techie condescension' towards a culture of genuine care for the user. It's so weird how many people spend their lives building software for people who they think are idiots…
February 25th, 2010 at 12:04 pm (#)
When I look at the comments here, I realize that there's a bit of prejudice we all subscribe to. No one admits to being the first type:)
February 25th, 2010 at 5:11 pm (#)
This same thought occurred to me when I noticed the high number of people who said they were of Type 3.
But then I realized that it makes total sense. Here's why:
Type 1: “Those who have a passion for nothing” are unlikely to read a post on “Three types of passion”.
Type 2: “Those who have a passion for one thing” are not as likely to be interested in an article on “three types of passion” and are less likely to find such an article.
Type 3: “Those who have a passion for everything” are most likely to be searching for some type of order — some type of understanding about why they're passionate about so many things. They would probably find an article titled “three types of passion” quite intriguing. These types are also most likely to be on Twitter and other social networking sites searching for information and reading things that may only be of passing interest, thereby increasing their chances of finding this article.
February 25th, 2010 at 9:20 pm (#)
[...] The $5 guerrilla user test — Bumblebee Labs (via @joelflom) [...]
February 26th, 2010 at 1:25 am (#)
superb post.. ofcourse i am third type
February 26th, 2010 at 1:43 am (#)
A big question.. !!!
February 26th, 2010 at 3:06 pm (#)
[...] The $5 Guerrilla User Test [...]
February 27th, 2010 at 4:21 am (#)
“… This is, perhaps, why the internet is so full of assholes who think they’re the smartest person in the room. If you have a look at the comment section of almost any piece of content, at least half the comments tend to be some snide implication that the commenter is smarter than the author. …”
I won't say I'm particularly smart, but I tend to agree with your point on commentators and comments: cf ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1151777
How do you limit the “sig to noise” and still allow comments?
February 27th, 2010 at 10:11 am (#)
very interesting….but my opinion on this…..i think most people would put themselves in the third category…..even looking at the comments below most seem firmly rooted in category 3….
February 27th, 2010 at 4:19 pm (#)
Hang, this is weird. It seems like our blog posts overlapped again. This is an awesome post. But what's interesting is that about a month ago I wrote my first blog post which argues that the path to true happiness lies in simulated annealing. I also include an explanation of simulated annealing and how it can be applied to achieving happiness. Would be interested to hear your thoughts.
http://www.astatespacetraveler.com/a-mathematic...
February 27th, 2010 at 5:22 pm (#)
Hi Onetimer,
Raam earlier in the comments has he right answer I think. This is a blog post that Type 3 people are more likely to find and so there is the illusion that there are more type 3 people out there. As a guess, I would say in real life, it's probably 60% type 1, 30% type 2 & 10% type 3.
February 28th, 2010 at 5:19 pm (#)
You've managed to express a very elaborate idea in a catch phrase
Loved the post.
PS: Why is recording one's errors “a common awful idea.” ?
It saves time and resources for anyone else trying the same thing a few years later!
In fact, this is one of the most common practices in science!
February 28th, 2010 at 8:17 pm (#)
Can you point me to a repository of failed ideas? An encyclopedia of error? That it doesn't exist is proof that is one of those unoriginal & wrong things that people try & fail to create again & again.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:16 pm (#)
There is no repository because mistakes are not going to be glorified..but they are recorded and difficult to find. Recording mistakes is not an awful idea.
A famous example would be the two proposed models for structure of the Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
We all now know that the DNA is a double helix as what was suggested by Watson and Crick in their publication (http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollec...)
However, there is available information about the triple helix model proposed by Pauling and Corey. http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollec...
It gives a perspective about how data was interpreted at the time and saves anyone new from coming to the same wrong conclusion.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:40 pm (#)
In science (elsewhere too?) “right” and “wrong” are not absolute qualities. They change with time. What was right once, e.g. Newton's laws, can be replaced by something more right, e.g. Relativistic Dynamics a la Einstein. As a result, the entire body of scientific literature is a mish-mash of right and wrong. Ideas are correct in some limited way. And yes, all those papers can be thought to be an ever increasing encyclopedia of errors.
March 1st, 2010 at 7:29 pm (#)
I was probably a bit unclear in my post. The phenomena I was talking about was the one where people first realize that there's a bias against wrong ideas and think “well, I'm going to *fix* this once and for all and it will be a great boon to society and bootstrap progress to the next level because never again will people fail to aware of wrong ideas again”.
This is a supreme irony because they are falling into the exact same trap that they were just made aware of. They're walking over the corpses of a thousand other people who tried the exact same thing after the exact same realization and there's something both deeply funny and deeply sad about this that I couldn't resist mentioning.
March 7th, 2010 at 7:10 am (#)
[...] Women Don’t Understand Friendship (bumblebeelabs.com) [...]
March 7th, 2010 at 4:58 pm (#)
Hang,
We've only met a few times (via Jim Henderson), but I wanted to drop a brief note here. I'm sorry the startup didn't play out the way you had hoped – I've been through the same kind of experience myself. Knowing when to pull the plug and move on is really tough. But now that you've done that, and have set a new direction, I truly hope that you're able to quickly find a great fit with a company, and bring value, creativity, and forward thinking to their vision.
All the best to you.
March 8th, 2010 at 2:53 am (#)
I like this idea, but can I borrow your laptop as I don't want any of my drunk friends using mine.
March 9th, 2010 at 1:34 pm (#)
[...] Hacker News Dinner Party #1 « Bumblebee Labs Blog [...]
March 10th, 2010 at 12:47 pm (#)
[...] know a group of people who would be interested in hearing about my work. I’m also looking to get hired to an interesting position, working on projects that have impact so if you know anyone who’s [...]
March 12th, 2010 at 1:52 pm (#)
You could toss 95% of the world’s men into a meat grinder to make hotdogs and the birthrate and overall quality of life of everyone would be unaffected.
ha, right, for the four days until the infrastructure stopped working.
are you really stupid enough to think that a society composed almost exclusively of women could actually keep the electricity on? the heavy trucks rumbling down the highways (or the highways rumbling at all?) the water coursing through the pipes?
you're not very smart, or, at least, incredibly naive.
i hope that you are no more than twenty years old. if you are, please get out of the basement more often.
March 15th, 2010 at 9:32 am (#)
[...] User testing in bars 15 03 2010 The $5 Guerrilla User Test « Bumblebee Labs Blog. [...]
March 15th, 2010 at 1:00 pm (#)
[...] March 6th – 21st, I’m down in the bay area looking for work as a social interaction designer. I thought it would be fun way to meet people, while down here, to cook for a bunch of Hacker News [...]
March 15th, 2010 at 3:19 pm (#)
[...] full post on Hacker News If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it! Tagged with: courses [...]
March 15th, 2010 at 3:42 pm (#)
[...] My HN Dinner Party #3 « Bumblebee Labs Blog [...]
March 15th, 2010 at 9:52 pm (#)
Love it! You're a genius and radically fresh in your approach
March 15th, 2010 at 10:11 pm (#)
So, “Hi.” This was an amazingly interesting writeup. I always see cooking as a chore, despite proddings from friends who enjoy it, so it was fascinating to read about your creative process behind it. Not just that, but also the impromptu nature of what you did; being able to cook a large, unplanned meal on demand is quite a feat, and akin to an athletic or artistic performance.
March 15th, 2010 at 10:25 pm (#)
The lavender soda was easily my favorite part
Nice job, Hang.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:54 pm (#)
Vancouver foodies would pay good money to eat your food. I mean – people here are willing to go to underground supper clubs to experience exciting and fresh menus!
March 16th, 2010 at 1:47 am (#)
Hi from Hong Kong.
March 16th, 2010 at 2:16 am (#)
Nice read! I am about 1.5 years into being obsessed with cooking. It is great to see the very positive results earned from spending (too much?) free time slaving in the kitchen. A general observation: I think you ought to make a living with food rather than design
March 16th, 2010 at 2:49 am (#)
Excellent post.
FYI, I read the whole thing, except the descriptions of course two through to six. I'm not sure why, I guess I was just more interested in the other parts. Yet my favourite bit was in the description of the first course, making an analogy to optimisation in 8 variables! Yep, let's go back and check out those other courses…
March 16th, 2010 at 3:10 am (#)
Awesome article! I host a weekly potluck, and have started turning the occasional one into a 7 course meal. The first one came together really well, and we have a second one planned for later this month.
I totally agree about value in perception but would add that, as you stated later, the most enjoyment of the meal comes from the company and the atmosphere.
One of the best meals I've made was meatballs and spaghetti with a sauce that I threw together with whatever i had left lying around in the kitchen / pantry. It had crushed tomatoes from a can, water, chopped baby carrots, diced onion, chopped scallions, some oil (for the onion saute), garlic powder, dried oregano, dried basil, salt, pepper, and a little sugar. After simmering for about an hour, poured in a bag of frozen meatballs, left it simmering for another 4 hours, then cooked the pasta and served it.
Very little work, very low price, great result.
Thanks for this article, I am also in the beginnings of a start up, so it felt true to heart on all levels.
Nick
March 16th, 2010 at 5:51 am (#)
Thanks for the great post! I'm definitely going to try a bunch of these when I get some time away from lab.
March 16th, 2010 at 8:11 am (#)
Hang – love the dedication you gave to both the article, the food and your trip out to the Bay Area in general. Will keep that piece of insight you had about Bay Area people being willing to change their behavior, and those outside are not. Thanks again!
March 16th, 2010 at 8:22 am (#)
My take on these ego dilemma posts is this:
Whether or not you actually are the one to solve the Holy Grail problem or not, your chances are higher if you truly believe you will solve it, while simultaneously preparing yourself for the possibility you won't.
Our team convinced ourselves each year that we were going to win the NCAA championships. 4 years in a row, we didn't. But my fifth year (I redshirted due to injury) we did. You don't win a national championship by thinking “the chances of us winning are soooo low”. You win it by believing, irrationally, that THIS year, you're going to win it all.
March 16th, 2010 at 8:44 am (#)
Hey, great write-up, keep it coming.
March 16th, 2010 at 1:26 pm (#)
Hi from Stockholm.
March 16th, 2010 at 11:30 am (#)
[...] My HN Dinner Party #3 « Bumblebee Labs Blog (tags: cooking food recipe cook hackernews) [...]
March 16th, 2010 at 7:23 pm (#)
Thanks for the eventful evening. A great time was had by all!
March 16th, 2010 at 8:39 pm (#)
How did you cook the Kulfi faster?
March 16th, 2010 at 8:46 pm (#)
Wide, non-stick pan to maximize evaporation. Pre-chilling by stirring it in a bowl set in an ice bath & freezing in a large, shallow, metal pan.
It's all about the thermodynamics
.
March 16th, 2010 at 10:52 pm (#)
Actually, science and engineering have know for a long time how bumblebees fly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee#Flight
March 16th, 2010 at 11:06 pm (#)
haha.. what about the day every female on facebook was posting her bra colour..
March 16th, 2010 at 11:09 pm (#)
Meh. You say it yourself, you can't learn what stupidity is until you flub a few things. So isn't it better to look at everyone on their own journey through stumbling on mistakes?
Plus, you yourself cite some adventures caused by your ceasing to worry about looking stupid.
In other words, stop worrying about stupidity and have faith in your fellow human beings.
Or is that what you mean by “anti-stupid?” I don't think so, as your last paragraph is just worrying about people being stupid–”it’s a tragic thing for me to see many smart people waste their talent going down paths which I’m scared may be stupid.” Don't worry about it! If they're really smart they're by definition not wasting their talent, they're discovering their own obstacles. It's neither your responsibility nor your right to judge their “stupidities.”
March 16th, 2010 at 9:11 pm (#)
[...] Indie Bakery! In chocolate, pastry on March 16, 2010 at 18:41 A mention from BumblebeeLabs dinner party review from last Saturday. My pithiviers from last week made it onto the dessert menu [...]
March 17th, 2010 at 3:18 pm (#)
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March 17th, 2010 at 8:46 pm (#)
I read the whole thing, so “hi!” A few weeks ago, I realized that I have a choice between learning to cook properly or eating unhealthy processed foods for the rest of my life. I chose cooking. Most of the dishes I've prepared so far have been disastrous, but I'm OK with that. I learn something new each time, and I will eventually figure out what I'm doing. Your HN dinners are a real inspiration to me, since they show what is possible after several years of practice. I just need to be patient and keep trying.
Plus, it's always fun to read about good food.
March 17th, 2010 at 9:28 pm (#)
Could you suggest books or websites to read?
I would love to improve my skills at cooking. Thanks!
March 20th, 2010 at 5:06 am (#)
Well put. That's what I've experienced and while I think it'd be fun to be immersed in such a culture, it also scares the shit out of me. I enjoy the perspective I have outside of the valley and don't think I'm at all inhibited in creating great products where I'm at. Granted, I'm also not looking for funding.
March 21st, 2010 at 5:56 am (#)
Damn Hang… I'm a fan of your posts and I liked this at first, but 'none' kinda handed your ass to you.
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:15 am (#)
While it's true that you can learn some things things through the observation of others, it's kind of like learning how to play basketball by watching a lot of NBA games. There's nothing that replicates the feeling of actually being stupid, especially that niggling insistence in the back of your head that you're not actually being stupid.
As for smart people being incapable of doing stupid things, I couldn't disagree more. It's the smartest among us who are the most capable of being stupid. Look at communism, social darwinism, libertarianism, behaviorism and a plethora of other isms. These people were not discovering their own obstacles and groping their way to smartness. They were just being plain stupid, often as a direct result of being afraid to seem stupid.
March 24th, 2010 at 6:45 am (#)
Hi. Wandered over here from the Bakery Bites blog. I'll be incorporating some of your tips the next time I cook for company.
March 24th, 2010 at 9:06 am (#)
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March 26th, 2010 at 2:52 am (#)
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March 26th, 2010 at 3:54 am (#)
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March 27th, 2010 at 3:20 am (#)
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March 30th, 2010 at 2:55 am (#)
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March 30th, 2010 at 7:19 am (#)
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March 31st, 2010 at 1:13 am (#)
That's an absolutely insightful presentation, a wonderful combination of abstract ideas and concrete examples. Thank you for sharing it!
March 30th, 2010 at 11:52 pm (#)
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March 31st, 2010 at 7:41 am (#)
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March 31st, 2010 at 1:33 pm (#)
I'll side with those that did not like the article, albeit for a different reason that most: It seems a pessimistic take on Roy F. Baumeister's essay “Is there anything good about men?” (http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodabou...), which is simply a better article with a more scientific approach to the same topic.
So Aug Bohr's article felt like a waste of time. Since you had never heard about that article (I deduce that from “presents a perspective that I had never heard before”), I can understand that you went with Aug Bohr's article instead to spark a conversation. But personally, I like the quick start that the more balanced article provides, because less provocation leads to a more rational discourse.
March 31st, 2010 at 2:00 pm (#)
See, always try to sell my lack of flexibility as “basic usability analysis”.
Here's my take on the part about adopting behaviours to fit technologies:
Adapting your life to fit a technology is not generally bad. Actually, it is how we humans do most things, isn't it? Writing for example: Isn't it strange that we adapted so much that most stuff we use requires us to be able to read the instructions/street signs?
The fun things is: Early adopters usually adapt to stupid things, too. It is somewhat hard to decide when this makes sense or not. I chose not to be an early adopter. I may not be as cool, but it preserves my dignity
So, on the calendar thing: I happen to work for a company that went to great lengths to implement this privacy thing in a company calendar, starting more than 5 years ago. I'd say that most products that force openness do it because it is easier and the devs were pissed off by all the complicated use cases / user stories / narratives. But some went this way, because modeling a consistent system based on our behaviours (“no, my secretary does not need to know where I spend the night, but she needs some facts to tell my wife” is one of my favourite use cases. I very much deny the existence of such user stories in our technical documents, of course) sometimes does not work.
In this case, technology gives us a hint how we can change our lives to be more consistent, which, for me, saves me a lot of trouble.
Another example: Being logged in here with my twitter account forced me to make a conscious decision about the information I am divulging. It actually made my life better to adapt to this “I'm me”/”I'm someone fake”/”I'm anonymous” trinity of personalities
But yes, people also do stupid things because of technology. And those in The Valley probably more than most
March 31st, 2010 at 4:22 pm (#)
Actually, “Is there anything good about men” is one of my touchstone essays which I return to read about once every year or so and continually discover new depths. It was that essay, which I referred to Aug Bohr that prompted his thinking on “why women don't understand friendship”.
During the editing stage, one of my persistent criticisms was that half the article was a poor rehashing of “is there anything good about men” without adding much to that discourse.
However, I still found the extension of the ideas found into the field of friendship specifically to be an interesting application of the ideas found. What was finally convincing to me was that I sent a draft to a number of male and female friends of mine and, while the males almost universally thought it was stupid, quite a number of women thought the ideas had some merit.
March 31st, 2010 at 9:49 pm (#)
Hi Tobias,
Thanks for your comments! Of course, I was making an extreme point with my dichotomy, people can be forced, through extreme effort, to change the fundamentals of how they behave to better accommodate technology.
The difference in the valley is the casualness of it and the feeling that it's not a big deal. It's a failure to appreciate that, for their software to be useful requires a major lifestyle change for most people.
April 1st, 2010 at 1:23 pm (#)
[...] There are only three types of ideas. [...]
April 1st, 2010 at 1:24 pm (#)
[...] There are some ideas which are stupid but sound smart on the surface. If you come up with that stupid idea independently, then you will tell someone and they will go “huh”. These are the ideas you have to be worried about because they are the persistently stupid ideas. Persistently stupid ideas come to a person, are tried, fail and then disappear, leaving very little trace of their existence after they are gone. As a result, each generation comes up with the same persistently stupid ideas anew and wastes energy and resources chasing the same illusory pot of gold. This is why you have to be worried about them. The only way to avoid persistently stupid ideas is to learn how to become reflexively allergic to stupid. [...]
April 2nd, 2010 at 12:12 am (#)
What about ideas that are really smart but sound stupid on the surface? Seems like many startups that were ultimately successful were once regarded as stupid.
April 3rd, 2010 at 1:57 am (#)
dude we gotta talk.
i'm also struggling within and my ego dillema has actually reached a place where it's behavior is so innate that it will fool me without my knowledge.
though after some thought and a vague amount of baggage i might be able to propose a solution.
trust me, (see the ego on these simple words? these words came so innate while writing this that i believe it to be my ego trying to portray a sort of wiked attempt at proving your theory might be right though still inconclusive – and this might be my superiority hands on trying to manage a sutil way of telling you, you're wrong – though knowing this may be impossible, after reading your latter text, please do not take it personally – im also just being myself, and for this i elaborate :
while my sutil ego tries to show its superiority it is acctually maskarding an attempt to convince myself of my value – lame, i know.
it is actually so lame that i will not depict my resolution until i'm assure that i've grasped your attention while showing my simillar traits.
(im having a ball while aware of my “lame-like” behavior – anyways … screw it – im honest – hahaha – this is probably my ego doing the whole thing again…)
April 4th, 2010 at 9:02 am (#)
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April 5th, 2010 at 1:48 pm (#)
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April 6th, 2010 at 12:19 pm (#)
This is a stupid post. But the truth is, I have forgotten the reason why. At one point, I had read the literature, carefully constructed the argument, considered it from all sides, correctly rejected all the wrong arguments against it, worked through the implications of the correct reason, concluded that this was a stupid post, then promptly emptied out my brain of all that datum except that it was persistently stupid.
April 7th, 2010 at 9:07 am (#)
Hang,
Have been following ur blog since quite some time now…
You often discuss interesting stuff
It was lovely to read about your Indian Food experiment
Would love it if you could hold one of ur dinners here in India
April 13th, 2010 at 9:44 am (#)
I'm afraid this quote is inadequate, but not for the reasons you're suggesting. Many believers I know don't dismiss other gods because they are clearly mythological/man-made/just-plain-silly, while maintaining that the Christian God is reasonable/logical to believe in. I'm afraid they dismiss the other gods because they often attribute their “works” to the influence of Satan or demons, and because the Christian God is the only one true God. I'm afraid they think that the claims of other religions might be just as reasonable as their own, if not for the fact that their God had warned them against worshiping false idols and other gods. It's not necessarily that other religions make less sense, it's that they're rivals to the one true path.
A lot of believers are absolutely crippled by magical thinking. We need to more clearly make the point that rational, non-spiritual thought is a different and clearer way to look at the world.
April 16th, 2010 at 1:47 pm (#)
A watch is actually significantly more difficult than a chair due to the complexity of the flat features. Your attempts so far are quite decent actually.
A chair is one of the standard examples in the 'right-brained drawing' method I blogged about last week, because its wire-frame-like structure creates lots of negative space 'holes' etc. Drawing by shading the negative space rather than by outlining the positive space, is one of the easiest and most effective techniques I've learned. You may want to try that with the outline of your watch, but the inner details will be hard to get at that way. Another great technique is upside down drawing, but that won't work with watches (works great with portraits from photographs though… idea is to short-circuit the recognition parts of your brain).
April 17th, 2010 at 8:49 am (#)
The second course makes one dare not stop eating.
April 18th, 2010 at 5:33 pm (#)
Go for it. One of my best friends is, well, to put it mildly, quite far away from physical work. He's the one I got in mind when someone else says “everyone can do such a simple thing” and I protest.
Yet he decided to learn drawing and he succeeded. What he does great is analytical thinking (oh, an IT guy, surprise!). So he went at it the hard-core way: Professional instruction with all the theory. And lots of practice.
You're doing the practice thing already, but get some good instruction also. Sketching is usually an introductory course at most universities and some of the distance-learning ones are actually pretty cheap.
As an IT guy you probably already know the value of professional tutelage and you can value the time you save, so I'd recommend trying that in addition to regular practice.
April 23rd, 2010 at 11:51 am (#)
well in today's world can one do both and still leave an mark in th world
the pt. is for leading a good life – u live by rules well-laid, be practical, conformist and just take care of our NEST( your family) and make sure you are not out favour in your social circles. (IQ, SQ,). TODAY .mnay try to create SQ, but it EQ that is what stands out and makes genuine leaders in all spheres of life.
the choice of option-2:- it may be a long road, but how many will even care to understand it. if u are eccentric nd erattic and unwavered in your attitude then its taken as a case of being abnormal generally.
the way is do great things is by doing small things and have incremental approach largely, that is how we create a legacy for all near and dears!
April 24th, 2010 at 7:25 am (#)
I finished the read as well after hearing about your cooking exploits. Looking forward to cooking w/ you sometime!
April 27th, 2010 at 6:42 am (#)
Love the third course…so yummy. Just be careful not to over indulge especially with beers.
April 27th, 2010 at 5:24 pm (#)
[...] It was during my thoughts around this last point that I realized the true allure and power of Twitter. The middle-men connecting the average person with anyone has been removed, whether they know them personally or not. First off – I in no way assume this has not been thought of before, or never been discussed; as I’m a firm believer that anything you think of is either unoriginal or wrong. [...]
April 29th, 2010 at 2:22 pm (#)
WOW great post! A bit late to the party I know, only stumbled across now. I think I'm a type 3 who's always been very frustrated thinking I'm a type 1 because I don't have a specific interest and thinking that the only reason I'm not like others types 1 is because I happen to be smart. It's quite interesting this view, need to revisit my thoughts and maybe just embrace that my interests are all scattered around.Cheers!
April 30th, 2010 at 5:47 pm (#)
Haha… good one
April 30th, 2010 at 6:02 pm (#)
Type your comment here.Oh this topic… It's unscientific. It's creative. It's scrappy. I think I like it.
(Although Josh Walsh has a good point about choosing the proper group test) Nice to visit your site. Wish you post another good topic like this. I will wait to read it.
May 1st, 2010 at 7:27 pm (#)
Exactly! Here is my take on it:
http://thoughtfulfaith.wordpress.com/2010/05/01...
May 1st, 2010 at 7:34 pm (#)
Thanks Chucky! That was a great post.
May 3rd, 2010 at 11:50 pm (#)
there's a tension between giving an optimal user experience and showing enough ads that you can actually afford to keep the server running (and perhaps buy yourself a coffee now and then).
May 4th, 2010 at 3:38 am (#)
I agree most comics are like that, though there's always xkcd, for which at least your first two points are true.
May 5th, 2010 at 7:47 pm (#)
I think the solution isn't for each comic to solve this problem independently but for someone to develop software specifically for reading webcomics.
Most comics have an rss feed nowadays (and most of those are decent feeds, though you still sometimes get the brain-dead feed which requires you to click through to actually read the comic), so a useful first stab at this would simply be a feed reader. Future enhancements could provide for things like archive browsing (few comics actually have the entire archive in their feed). Users could switch from regular consumption mode to archive reading mode; in the latter, the entire archive would appear unread. Perhaps this would be as simple as providing a “mark all unread” feature to go with the standard “mark all read” feature.
Also, sorting would necessarily be done through increasing chronological order, and the main view would probably be sorted by comic. That way when I'm reading my unread comics, I would be able to read all of comic A before moving on to comic B rather than alternating in strict chronological order.
It would probably also be important to incorporate advertising into the reader. This could be as easy as telling each author to put ads in their feeds if desired.
Obviously features such as keyboard navigation a la Google Reader would be important as well.
This would also make it possible to publish a webcomic as just a feed, with only a Spartan page (or even no page at all, if you hosted your feed on feedburner or similar).
May 13th, 2010 at 10:12 am (#)
[...] a good post by Hang at Bumblebee Labs (a blog that is well worth reading, by the way) titled The Silicon Valley "Bubble". Hang argues that the real difference between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world is In the [...]
May 22nd, 2010 at 3:52 am (#)
Instead of slides, I see “This document has either been removed or made private by its owner”
May 23rd, 2010 at 8:01 pm (#)
Larry, Slideshare seems to be having problems with my slides. I'll try and get it fixed ASAP.
June 1st, 2010 at 6:14 am (#)
I'm also confused with its web design. I wonder if that website still gets good traffic.
June 8th, 2010 at 8:50 am (#)
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June 13th, 2010 at 2:38 pm (#)
You're logic is predicated on several falacies. Atheists aren't claiming there's no gods. That's the default position. List 500 gods you believe in. Well, if you don't believing in 499 of those gods, then you're an atheist with regard to those gods.
You believe in the ONE that some other faith would not. Well, that's what atheists are saying… step back… look… and THINK!
The Shakespeare interpolation is faulty. Both Francis Bacon and Shakespeare were real historic figures. This is not a just analogy, since the difference between the theist and atheist argument is basically a debate over the believability of the theist claims, ones which defy historical account and most of which lie outside of the testable realm of science. Big difference. You need to be aware of the context of the information, not just manipulate the terminology via semantics for rhetorical reasons.
Arabs flying planes is not related to whether or not conspiracy theorists believe 9/11 happened or not. The analogy falls flat. I think you need to understand atheism before you can comment on it. Try a dictionary and go from there.
June 15th, 2010 at 7:07 pm (#)
His site visits keep growing every year. He gets more clicks than just about every major news agency.
Michael you seem to miss the point, function is design. The point of a website is to get clicks, you design is has to be 100% related to this goal or else the design is useless. The results for the site speaks for itself.
It think too many people in this debate bring Drudge's politics into the debate. A poorly designed website can't get Billions of visits. Period.
June 16th, 2010 at 2:31 pm (#)
Good points that actually apply to all kinds of image gallery software.
If you treat comics like images, this would be all one needed. If one allows for more narrative control for comic creators, other approaches might be viable, too. Pay a visit to the incredible http://scottmccloud.com/ if you got some free time.
June 18th, 2010 at 4:43 am (#)
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June 18th, 2010 at 4:43 am (#)
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June 18th, 2010 at 4:45 am (#)
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June 18th, 2010 at 4:46 am (#)
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June 18th, 2010 at 5:37 am (#)
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July 1st, 2010 at 6:31 pm (#)
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July 5th, 2010 at 3:18 am (#)
I have been hooked on Veetle since I came across it. It is like HBO or Showtime on your computer. The best you only choose a station, they choose the show. Great Post!
July 7th, 2010 at 2:24 am (#)
Whoever the author is I think he don;t really like the idea of men and women having an equal kind of respect in our society. Like men, women values friendship a lot.
July 12th, 2010 at 4:57 pm (#)
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July 16th, 2010 at 8:46 am (#)
I couldn't get past the title… it's no one not noone… learn to spell… maybe I will read
July 16th, 2010 at 6:37 pm (#)
You have stamina, I wish I was at your party with the 19 different courses
OMG the picture of one of your dishes it soo beautiful
you have so much skill.
I have a blog as well we also do big dinner parties.
http://thesitdownaffair.tumblr.com/
Your dinner party is a great inspiration.
THANKS
July 16th, 2010 at 6:39 pm (#)
You have soo much stamina I wish I was at your dinne rparty I can't believe you cooked for all those people practicly by yourself.
-
I have a blog and do dinner parties as well
http://thesitdownaffair.tumblr.com/
-
Happy cooking
July 18th, 2010 at 3:59 am (#)
thank you! That looks like a great resource
July 19th, 2010 at 8:42 pm (#)
Keen observation. I've been without paid TV for about a year and I find myself gravitating more and more. It's good old channel surfing…in the wild wild west.
July 22nd, 2010 at 7:26 am (#)
As I see in the pictures you provided I am sure that the one you have cooked for were satisfied and much more.I would! I wonder how did you make that Lamb Kofta, Tzatziki Sauce, Salad & Pita because I didn't find anything on the internet that looks just like what you have in your pictures.
____________________________________________________________
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July 26th, 2010 at 9:14 am (#)
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I broadcast there and it is as addicting to do as it is to watch other broadcasts so all around the site is very addicting and unique 
and I love it.
July 29th, 2010 at 11:16 pm (#)
thats one sweet article …,
July 29th, 2010 at 11:22 pm (#)
I am the opposite. I nursed an old B&W TV for 2 years in grad school. Then I had a dorm-sized, 13″ TV/DVD combo for 5 -6 years that moved across several apartments with me. I bought a 46″ big screen last year.
I *like* TV because I *don't* want too much control. I like schedules and not having to think. Okay, I DVR things sometimes, but I could never really get into online watching. I've only started recently watching Netflix via my Wii on my big screen, and only for shows like Yes, Minister, that are not available on scheduled programming.
What you are describing is you rediscovering the joys or a reduced decision-making burden. I like sensible default scheduled programming to chug along, and only occasionally mess with the schedule
Join the club of lazy watchers. You've been working too hard on your TV for too long!
Venkat
July 30th, 2010 at 1:15 pm (#)
Bah! I said I like Veetle but I'm not going back to something as archaic as actual television. Having to watch TV at 8pm instead of midnight like I like? Worry while I'm out with friends that if they don't stop being interesting within the next 10 minutes, I'll miss the start of Mad Men? Stupid, interminable ads every 7 minutes? The scientifically optimized parasitic mind viruses that they've developed on VH1?
Seriously, no thanks.
My few incidental exposures with actual television have left me firmly thankful that I abandoned that medium a long time ago. Veetle is neo-Television to Television's plain Television.
July 30th, 2010 at 1:40 pm (#)
LOL! Alright, homo media superioris
July 30th, 2010 at 6:44 pm (#)
“Because we see people spend years learning to be a professional doctor but not learning to be professional arguers…”
Then what do you call attorneys?
August 3rd, 2010 at 8:35 am (#)
I came here because I couldn't sleep and found a post on reddit…
Still not sleeping, but enjoying it more now.
August 12th, 2010 at 7:11 pm (#)
[...] The $5 Guerrilla User Test -what a crock! – I couldn’t resist commenting
« User Experience for Start-ups [...]
August 13th, 2010 at 12:03 am (#)
There are so many things I disagree with here. but most of all, this seems utterly ridiculous: “You want someone who’s pretty drunk but not completely trashed. ” and “Match the bar you’re going to with the user population you want to target. “.
And how about not pre-judging your participants: “Focus on people who don’t normally get talked to at bars, middle aged people, homely girls, the guy sitting in the corner.”
I especially like: it “gives you insights you never would have gotten hiring a professional usability consulting firm”. ah that's probably because usability professionals interview people who actually fit within the target audience of the product.
I'm all for lean usability principles, but they have to be implemented correctly or else much of your time is wasted. Let's say you interviewed 8 people over 2 hours for $40 bucks. and none of them actually fit the typical user profile for your site. You would be better interviewing 3 people who fit the profile for 20 minutes each and giving them $10… or a movie voucher. whatever seems of value to them.
Then again, I might have completely missed the mark. perhaps this is meant to be a humerous article…
August 13th, 2010 at 12:03 am (#)
There are so many things I disagree with here. but most of all, this seems utterly ridiculous: “You want someone who’s pretty drunk but not completely trashed. ” and “Match the bar you’re going to with the user population you want to target. “.
And how about not pre-judging your participants: “Focus on people who don’t normally get talked to at bars, middle aged people, homely girls, the guy sitting in the corner.”
I especially like: it “gives you insights you never would have gotten hiring a professional usability consulting firm”. ah that's probably because usability professionals interview people who actually fit within the target audience of the product.
I'm all for lean usability principles, but they have to be implemented correctly or else much of your time is wasted. Let's say you interviewed 8 people over 2 hours for $40 bucks. and none of them actually fit the typical user profile for your site. You would be better interviewing 3 people who fit the profile for 20 minutes each and giving them $10… or a movie voucher. whatever seems of value to them.
Then again, I might have completely missed the mark. perhaps this is meant to be a humerous article…
August 13th, 2010 at 12:27 am (#)
“The first time you do it, you’re probably going to be suffering from approach anxiety. Start off approaching a group of the same sex as you so that the encounter isn’t sexualized.”
Erm, that may not *always* work.
August 13th, 2010 at 3:25 pm (#)
Thank you so much for this informative response. I hope it is helpful to many others as well.
August 13th, 2010 at 3:59 pm (#)
Hang, if only it was as easy as this…
I think this is a really fun article. This method seems like it would be a lot of fun, but I think that's all it is. It may reveal some usability issues that you had not seen in other diagnostics, but anything uncovered in this method would certainly need to be examined further. I would love to know the context in which the UX Specialist said his “drunk user” quote. Like everything in usability, it depends.
If I were designing an electronic game or music system to be used in a bar, this would be the perfect setting. Couple of beers, loud music, lots of flashing lights, sit them in front of the interaction design, see what happens. Perfect, I have no argument. I'm sure that the user group would be extremely honest too given inhibitions would be lowered.
But, you obviously just can't take any design and apply this method. Cockpits, medical equipment etc. If you just want to “…watch your application crash & burn as people do all sorts of ridiculous ass shit they would never do in a lab but constantly do in real life” then getting drunk people in front of a computer may not be the right way to go. Drunk people are going to show you “all sorts of ridiculous ass shit they would never do in a lab but constantly do when *drunk*”. If you want to test distraction and interruption then there are other much better ways to do that. If I was testing a new car dashboard design, I would give them a simulator (this would be your laptop in your example) and a cellphone. I'd keep calling it when they were driving the simulator. I don't know if I would get them drunk, because sure, they may take the car “off-roading” in the simulator when drunk, but they wouldn't do this in real life – not for the most part anyway.
Motivation is a huge factor when people work on applications or websites. For someone to do anything, they have to be motivated to do it. This is either because they will be fired, or they want to book a flight, or a social network application because they want to communicate etc etc. Yes, they may be indifferent about the design per se, but they aren't going to use something *because* of indifference – there is always a motivation. Within the first few seconds of the person using the site or application, you need to make them understand the foundation, the layout, the concept. The discovery stage is the time of least distraction, high motivation and highest concentration. Depending on the application or motivation, it may only last a few seconds but this is the time that is the most important to test. If your participant is under the influence (Under the Influence [UI] too funny) from the onset, you are going to lose this critical mental model building time. You'll almost certainly get a lot of false negatives.
Next, if your design is already on a laptop, you're probably too late. To me it would look like you already have your concepts and architecture rightly or wrongly figured out, and then you set someone down to evaluate the lower level user-interaction. Usability testing should be about iterative improvement, and not about about a final diagnostic to see if the product works. Testing at that stage may be, and is often too late.
Remember that UX specialists are looking for flaws in the design. They are like quality engineers. Yes, I know this happens in the real world, but the person designing the thing shouldn't be the person testing the thing. As a former developer, I never saw anything wrong with my code, and if there was a problem, I'd be making excuses for it, and somehow deem it acceptable. The same thing happens with design. If someone uncovers a legitimate issue in a bar, what's to stop the designer and tester saying “OK, yeah, but this person was extremely trashed…” and you throw out the data. It all just seems too risky.
Finally, the challenge of design isn't just the design – it's the politics, it's the buy-in from the development team, it's about convincing the management team that a different approach maybe necessary and that they need to invest more $$$ to make this thing work. I'm a UX specialist, and I can't imagine going to a VP with data collected from Paddy O'Shea's on Friday night with a show stopping usability issue and actually being taken seriously.
Yes, this is an extremely cheap method, but it's like everything – in the end you get what you pay for. UX Specialists, for the most part, know what they are doing, trust them.
August 13th, 2010 at 8:39 pm (#)
Hi Lisa,
The cost of formal usability testing is closer to $100 than $10 (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030120.html) and it costs even more when you take into account all the time required to organize (1 hour per participant!), record & analyze the results. The certainly have their place and are an invaluable tool but I think they are best used synergistically with other, cheaper tools.
While your target audience can be helpful uncovering more of the domain specific aspects of usability, their time is valuable and you want to spend it uncovering deep issues and not superficial usability concerns.
This is why testing people in your non-target audience is useful. They can still uncover a wide range of issues that should be fixed before you move onto formal usability testing. That way, you're not paying someone $171 for them to come in and say they can't find the button to buy the good because the language was unclear.
I'm not saying this is the be all and end all of user testing but I think it's a valuable tool to have in your arsenal as long as you understand the context of it's use.
August 13th, 2010 at 8:54 pm (#)
Mark, I think everything you've said makes a lot of sense and I generally agree with it. This is not the right tool for highly specialized equipment, companies with a staff of dedicated UX professionals on board or highly conservative management structures (this sadly rules out a lot of graduate students who would never be able to get this past an IRB). I should have made more clear in my article that I was primarily writing this for the type of software companies I had typically been dealing with, small, scrappy startups with tight deadlines building mainstream consumer web apps and comprised mostly of engineers with no full time UX person on board.
As for the laptop thing, I'm actually a huge fan of paper based prototyping but I didn't want to have to explain how to run a paper based user test in this article so I used the example of a laptop to simplify.
Thanks for your comment, it's always great to receive this kind of reasoned & insightful feedback.
Cheers
Hang
August 13th, 2010 at 9:03 pm (#)
[...] [from steve_portigal] The $5 Guerrilla User Test [Bumblebee Labs Blog] – [While we're obviously big advocates of getting input about designs from people as frequently as possible and at various levels of fidelity, it's a bit dissonant when informal methods get distilled (so to speak) into formal-seeming methods without any of the purposefulness and planfulness of established methods. Challenging to my assumptions and thus helpfully provocative] Drunk people are a pretty accurate mimic of distracted, indifferent people. This insight has lead to a wonderful technique I’ve been refining over the years that I call “The $5 Guerrilla User Test”. Here’s the 5 second version: 1. Bring a laptop to a bar, 2. Offer to buy someone a beer in exchange for participating in a user study, 3. Watch your application crash & burn as people do all sorts of ridiculous ass shit they would never do in a lab but constantly do in real life, 4. Go back, apply the lessons you have learnt, repeat until you have an app that is 100% drunk person proof Share this post [...]
August 18th, 2010 at 4:06 am (#)
so far I find veetle to be somewhat addicting, the one thing that would be a whole lot better would be that if you're showing stuff on veetle, you should post a schedule to show people out there what's coming up. IMHO
August 20th, 2010 at 3:53 am (#)
[...] “Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both” [...]
August 20th, 2010 at 7:05 am (#)
A kind of web design to be like that is extremely not good at all. I guess there's a big percent of bounce rate in that site.
August 24th, 2010 at 5:39 pm (#)
I see this in reverse – it gives me a nice cover for being nerdy and paranoid about privacy. I can claim that I'm not using it in order to maintain some sort of mystery about my social activities – that I'm not using it to provide myself with the social cover you mention at the beginning. That seems a much more accessible as an explanation than trying to argue privacy policy with people who think I'm just being quaint.
My friends already know I don't go out that often – maybe this works for people who are faking it and telegraphing that fact, but not if you've not already been bothering to fake it.
August 29th, 2010 at 7:01 pm (#)
best text! thank you.
September 1st, 2010 at 12:42 pm (#)
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