The 30 day recap and the next 30 days

November 14th, 2008 by Hang

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.

By an act of total serendipity, I happened upon an ACLU canvasser in my neighbourhood for today so I’m all paid up on that angle:

Doing this 30 day thing was definately interesting to me. I had been battling motivation problems with my blog for a while and it was amazing how such a simple thing managed to get me over the hurdle. As a result, I’m going to be trying another simple experiment.

Over the next 30 days, I’m going to try and develop 10 substantive features for the sites that I’m working on. The parameters of the challenge are the same, $20 to the ACLU for every challenge that I miss. It’ll be a good way to force me to work on some stuff that’s been sitting on the back burner for a while. I’ve yet to figure out how to emulate the social proof aspect although I might end up utilizing my sketches blog for that purpose.

At the same time, the blog is most definately not dead. I’ve got almost a dozen ideas still sitting around that need to be written about so subscribe to the RSS feed to keep yourself updated. The ironic thing seems to be that I’ve posted more content today than any other day now that I’m out of the one post per day format I set myself.

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Getting the design right

November 14th, 2008 by Hang

There’s an interesting discussion on reddit right now about the design of a certain computer retailer website in Australia and whether this was a legitimate example of poor design. It’s interesting to me because I actually bought a PCMCIA network card from those guys a long time ago and their customer service was so horrible that I swore never to do business with them again. Yet 4 years later, they’re still clearly in business and seem to have tripled the number of stores they own. So I think it’s an interesting question to ask of whether their website really is as poorly designed as the initial poster assumed it was.

Lets get the preliminary obvious things out of the way: The site has horrible aesthetics, a total disregard for correct color theory and horrendous usability problems (including PDF price lists, ugh). But as someone pointed out in the discussion thread, the stores also have lines going out the door every single day. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, when all you have is Dream Weaver, everything looks like a web design problem and just because the site has a web design problem does not mean that it has a design problem.

Lets say you had a journeyman web designer in to do a complete overhaul of the site. Nothing fancy, no high concept flash based monstrosity, just some simple, well laid out minimalistic, tasteful HTML and CSS. Would this be a better design?

Lets say this web designer was also a part time analytics dabbler as well and he knew the importance of not only doing good design but justifying it as well. He manages to prove that user engagement with the site is up, the bounce rate is lower and informal customer surveys indicate they love the new website. Surely this must be a better design right?

Being the paranoid web designer that he is though, he’s prepared yet more information to make his case: He points to how annual revenue increased 60% year on year even after controlling for other sources of growth. Mining the customer records indicates a significant increase of first time purchasers and a larger average orders per customer, all of which can be reasonably conclusively linked to the new word of mouth marketing and better navigation of the new website. Based on a reasonable set of accounting assumptions, the investment on a new website yielded a stunning 50,000% ROI. Satisfied that the designer has convincingly demonstrated the utility of his role, he sits back, utterly unable to comprehend any counter argument to how the previous website could be considered not be considered an example of bad design.

And yes, at this point, I would probably agree with him. If a mythical competent web designer fell into their laps, then there would be no excuse for them to keep the design of their old site. But here’s the thing, I’ve interacted with the owners of this company, they’re a family of stingy Asians (in the totally non-pejorative sense). These are not the types of people who would a) meet and b) appreciate a competent web designer. To imagine the preceding set of events happening, you first have to imagine a completely different type of business which is founded on a completely different business model and would be arguably as successful as the one they have now.

I’m not arguing that the site has good design, just that I’m open to the possibility that it’s not obviously bad design given the context and circumstances.

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Simulating a fair coin

November 14th, 2008 by Hang

A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon the question of how thick you would need to make a cylinder for it to be a fair three sided coin. Well, not having the patience to roll a cylinder 1000 times, I whipped up a quick simulation:

Turns out the height needs to be ~1.33 times the radius for there to be an exact equal chance to land on 3 sides.

So now you know.

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How not to do information visualisation

November 14th, 2008 by Hang

I was struck when looking at my Google Analytics just how useless this pie chart is:

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Nov 12th (day 30): No Evil Geniuses

November 12th, 2008 by Hang

Yesterday, 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 possible answers was really satisfying. In order to answer this question, I think you have to look further afield and ask some other interesting questions: “Why has there not been a non-pathetic foreign terrorist attempt on US soil since 9/11?” and “Why has there only been a handful of truly crippling computer viruses in the last 10 years”

Our first instinct is that such occurrences are rare because they are difficult. However, neither of these tasks actually are difficult. Two guys in a van managed to terrorize Washington DC for a month and no amount of security precautions could have prevented them from doing so. The Sasser worm was written “by someone that could barely get the code working” and attacked a security flaw that had been noted and patched months ago and other worms haven’t been much more sophisticated. Such things are not trivial but they aren’t of such herculean difficulty that would be sufficient to explain their rarity. Just why exactly isn’t there a legion of evil geniuses who are routinely executing the downfall of society?

An evil genius is anyone who is both a genius and evil where “Evil” encompasses everything from trolling to keying someone’s car to pedophilia, “Genius” is anything which evokes any degree of “huh, why didn’t I think of that?” or “That’s clever”. As a rough approximation, we assume that the number of evil geniuses can be calculated by multiplying the proportion of people who are geniuses with the proportion of people who are evil. But what I’ve noticed through looking at a huge range of diverse social systems is that evil geniuses exist at a stunningly lower frequency than this naive calculation would have us believe. The number of evil geniuses is so off base from the naive calculation that it indicates a our model of the world with regards to evil geniuses is unsalvagable and needs to be replaced, not just tweaked.

Such a claim has radical implications for the design of social systems as so much of our thinking about security, about design and about society is obsessed with preventing evil geniuses from wreaking havoc that we don’t even stop to notice that they aren’t.

Part of the reason we’re so obsessed with evil geniuses is because we think we know what they’re like: they’re just like us except they actually do the evil things we think about. Bruce Schneier, one of the most widely read security experts in the world writes about how

Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.

I replied: “What’s really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to.”

- The Security Mindset

“Why golly”, the man with the Security Mindset says, “I’ve found a great way to exploit this system. It’s lucky I’m a good person because all that is stopping me from executing this exploit for my personal gain is my innate goodness.”

It’s easy to imagine a person who is just like me except without my innate goodness. As a result, it’s easy to design a system with defenses against such a mythical attacker. What we completely fail to notice is that, most of the time, such an attacker simply does not materialize. But even though evil geniuses might not be a major problem, evil behavior most definitely is and it’s in our best interests to design a system which is resilient to pathological actions such as trolling, flaming and abuse.

Our naive view of the world is that we mentally segment people out into “good people” and “bad people”. Good people are people like us and bad people are people like us, except without any morality. The work of Milgram and Zimbardo shows though that goodness is largely a property of circumstance and the more correct way of thinking about the world is that most people are ordinary people and there are good situations and bad situations. If evil people are inherently evil, then it’s easy to imagine an evil genius. However, if evil is a product of the situation, then maybe the reason there are no evil geniuses was because noone gave them permission to be evil geniuses. The reason why Milgram and and Zimbardo managed to cause people to become evil was by relying on authority to signal that such actions were permissible. Genius, by definition, cannot provide be provided such social proof because you’re doing something new and unexpected. Without such social proof, it’s very hard to create an evil situation and, as a result, evil genius is hard to come by.

Such a statement has radical implications for design: you can cause pathological behavior simply by putting in visible mechanisms to prevent pathological behavior. We look to social cues within the system to understand acceptable bounds of behavior and in certain cases, one could reason that if the designer spent so much time building safeguards against certain behaviors into the system, such behavior must be prevalent and thus, acceptable to experiment with. In some cases, the correct approach to obsessing about the security of a system is to leave the system deliberately unsecured so that it does not even occur to people to test the security.

The “No Evil Geniuses” hypothesis is a radically different way to think about the world and one I don’t even think I can completely justify. At the same time, after having looked at all of these disparate cases in which there simply isn’t any other good explaination, it’s one I’ve been increasingly forced to take. Whenever I’ve gone out on a hunt to spot a rich treasure trove of evil geniuses, I’ve never been able to find them. Maybe there’s a simpler, more coherent explaination for all of this but until I find it, I’m going to bill this the No Evil Geniuses Paradox.

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Nov 11th (day 29): Bumblebees and Spam

November 11th, 2008 by Hang

Bumblebee Labs is called Bumblebee Labs because of the following quote:

Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly. But the bee does not know this, so it goes on flying anyway - Antoine Magnan

A bumblebee is an occurrence which cannot be explained by our current theory and thus, demands special attention. Bumblebees are the keys to uncovering areas where our understanding of the world drastically fail and how we can construct a better theory to explain what is happening. But to even notice bumblebees, you have to be on the lookout for them. You have to make a commitment to noticing when you theory goes awry and be willing to dig for an answer.

I was reminded of bumblebees while reading about how researchers infiltrated the storm botnet and discovered that the response rate to spam is 1 in 125 million (Slashdot, Original Paper). How is it that spam is still so awful in this day and age? Spam should be just like any other business, those who are incompetent at it should go out of business and those who do the best, thrive. But this does not seemingly explain why spam seems to have such abysmal conversion rates and why spammers aren’t innovating and experimenting with better ways of spamming.

Spam seems like the perfect vehicle for a data driven, analytic approach. Each email is constructed programatically, websites are created in a largely automated fashion and the path from action to profit is easy to chart out. All the necessary ingredients for Spam 2.0 seem to have been around for the last 10 years and yet spam is still universally awful.

How do we explain the quality of spam then? I can think of a couple of possible explanations, none of them satisfying:

• The spam we are getting now has been optimized and is the spam which maximizes conversion rates. If so, I would be very surprised as this seems to violate almost everything we know about marketing.
• Spam suffers from a supply problem, not a demand problem. Spammers only profit when there’s something to sell and there’s simply not enough people wanting to sell via spam to bother increasing response rate. Andrew Chen writes about how your ad-supported Web 2.0 site is actually a B2B enterprise in disguise and the same issues could be facing spammers. However, for spammers hawking V1agra, it seems like the potential supply should be limitless so I’m going to discount this theory for now.
• Quality is totally irrelevant to a spam campaign, high quality spam and low quality spam get close enough to the same response rate that it doesn’t matter. This might be true if you view spam not as an inducement but as a provider. The purpose of spam is not to convince you that you need a 12 inch h4rd C0ck, it’s to be there for those who have already decided a 12 inch h4rd C0ck is what would rock their world. If this is the case, it doesn’t matter what you put in the messages. However, this does not seem to account for Nigerian Scam emails which very much are set up like an inducement.
• Spam is an oligopoly and hard to break into. It might be the case that there really only are 3 or 4 actual spammers in the world and it’s a hard market to break into. If that’s the case, then it could be none of them have the necessary awareness or expertise to conduct a data driven campaign. There does not seem any obvious structural element to spam though that would make this the case. Given how many Silicon Valley titans have been overthrown by entrepreneurs, spam doesn’t seem to be any different.
• Spammers are all universally stupid. No one in spam is smart enough to conduct a data driven approach. This may be true but if so, it points to a gaping niche in the market which has been open for an extraordinarily long time. By all rights, an entrepreneur should have filled this space by now.

None of these explanations are wholly satisfying and none of them just plain sound right. There is one other explanation I have though which holds some tantalizing clues as to what the true answer might be. However, this explanation is so paradoxical, so shocking and so counter to our intuitive experience that all I can do today is lay the necessary groundwork to show how the problem of spam is a bumblebee that defies resolving with any of our conventional theories. If you have a better explanation for why spam is the way it is, post it in the comments. Otherwise, tune in tomorrow to understand the problem of spam can be explained by the fact that there are no evil geniuses.

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Nov 10th (day 28): The crisis in economics

November 10th, 2008 by Hang

Economics, however much economists seem wilfully blind to it, will soon undergo a radical paradigm shift (in the strict Kuhnian sense). The old model of the economically rational actor is coming increasingly untenable as we gather more evidence from behavioral psychology and a new paradigm of behavioral economics will be arriving within the next 10 - 30 years. What is interesting though is how obvious such a shift is from those outside of economics while insiders seem utterly unaware that the foundations they are standing on are crumbling.

Why is it that economists seem so blind to what’s going to happen in economics? There are the standard Kuhnian factors which Kuhn lays out in an exemplary fashion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but I think economics also had one other unique factor as well. Economics is a highly non-intuitive science and there is an almost perverse pride in illuminating just how poorly our naive view models the world: Raising the minimum wage decreases well being, trading with people who are universally more efficient than us increases our well being, allowing businesses to fail causes more businesses to suceed. These are all well established parts of the mainstream economics canon and they are all, by and large, true.

But the result of this curious structure of economics is that economists are extremely used to hearing well meaning and sincere economic arguments made by non-economists which are grossly flawed. They’re used to hearing the same shop-worn fallacies assembled to yet again make a seemingly devastating attack on the tenets of economics which, in reality, miss the mark so wide you could fit yo mamma through (sorry, I couldn’t resist). What’s more, these errors are conceptual in nature and to correct them would require indoctrinating the opposing party in the entire philosophy of economics.

As 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 listening and nod politely. And by and large, this is effective. For the vast majority of cases, people jibber jabbering about the evils of globalisation or the benifits of socialism simply have no idea what they are talking about. But the unfortunate side effect of this is that economics as a field has become highly insular and unreceptive to outside influences. In order to mount an effective attack on economics, one needs to be well versed in both the standard economic paradigm and the research methods and corpus of behavioural psychology. There simply aren’t enough people who have the time, intelligence, determination and opportunity to get to that point and, as a result, economics simply isn’t advancing.

Kuhn writes a lot about a crisis point and how paradigms tick over and I think an interesting thing is how the current bailout crisis just might be the crisis point needed for economics to finally start making the transition. The bailout crisis has begun to lay bare some of the fundamentally untenable assumptions of conventional economics and has brought to the forefront radical (to economists) new ways of analyzing human behaviour. Things like non-linear analysis, game theory of groups and incentive structuring theory. Terms like “Black swans” and “tipping points” are being used.

It may seem like such things were in economics already, game theory has been used in economics for decades. But the economics version of game theory was game theory formulated in an economic language. What this shift really represents is economists now being forced to grapple with very different standards of proof and modes of argument. Whether this will herald the beginning of a systematically behavioural view of economics remains yet to be seen.

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Nov 9th (day 27): Zero knowledge proofs

November 9th, 2008 by Hang

In cryptography, a zero knowledge proof is a way to prove that something is true without knowledge of what that thing is. For example, I could prove you know the password to a profile by having you insert the text “Hang, I own this profile qX45s” in the about me section but this would not give me knowledge about what the password is.

I use the term zero knowledge proof as ways of proving whether an assertion is correct without knowing anything about the domain itself. This is as opposed to “first order proofs” in which the proof relies on direct application of domain knowledge to determine truth. For example, if you were presented with a claim that the WTC towers were brought down with timed explosives, a zero knowledge proof would involve looking at who was making the claims, how coherently they are able to make their point, who are the major parties who disagree etc. A first order proof would computing the structural integrity of the buildings, verifying the melting points of steel and how it deforms under high temperature and assessing similar building collapses.

Zero knowledge proofs are powerful because they allow us to leverage the insight that we gain one domain to practically all aspects of life. Given powerful enough zero knowledge proofs, we can attempt to answer questions as diverse as “Is postmodernism bullshit”, “Is global warming real”, “Which president has better economic policies” and “Is the God described by any major religions real”. Unfortunately, most people’s toolbox of zero knowledge proofs suck.

Common zero knowledge proofs include things like whether the person sounds like they know what they’re talking about, whether they have an advanced degree from a prestigious institution, or simply whether they agree with you. Most of these zero knowledge proofs develop as instinctive heuristics and we never really give them much consideration.

Here are some basic zero knowledge proofs which I’ve found to be useful:

• How willing are they to admit the weaknesses and flaws in their own position?
• How well can someone argue against their own position? How aware are they of the best arguments from the other side?
• How willing are they to show you their raw data, their raw speculations and the tools neccesary for you to reach the position they are at?
• Do they have the support and endorsement of others who you know and trust according to similar zero knowledge proof or first order proof criteria?
• Have similar claims been made in the past and been systematically proven wrong?

A powerful toolbox of zero knowledge proofs is the most efficient way of applying analytical insight to a variety of fields. At the same time, even the best zero knowledge proofs cannot match a proper first order proof in determining power and the evidence gleaned from zero knowledge proofs must be placed in it’s context.

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Nov 8th (day 26): The state of Academic HCI

November 9th, 2008 by Hang

Jeff Atwood’s blog post on reading HCI Remixed lead me to try and clarify some of the thoughts I’ve been having on the role of Academic HCI and it’s relationship with developers, entrepreneurs and other interested parties in this space. I’m an enormous fan of the book and I know and admire many of people who have contributed essays to it but it’s never struck me as a book that would be of much use to those outside of the tight knit community of academic HCI researchers. On reflection, I’ve noticed an interesting distinction which might not be immediately apparent to outside observers.

The normal role of (good) academic research is to engage in medium to long term basic research which will eventually migrate it’s way into industrial research and finally into products. Academic material scientists are working on carbon nanotubes which will eventually be thrown over the wall to practising material scientists to make into space elevators. Academic biotechnologists are working on sequencing genomes to throw over the wall to practising biotechnologists to convert into gene therapy. Natural, the naive observer might expect that the role of Academic HCI is to develop new tools and techniques that practising HCI professionals can then take forward and use.

In actuality, the worlds of Academic HCI (including “Industrial Research”) and Professional HCI have very little to do with each other. Academic HCI is the province of major academic universities as well as industry research labs such as Microsoft Research, IBM and Xerox Parc. Professional HCI is largely the province of Interaction Designers, User Experience Engineers and Usability Experts who work for either large companies of consultancy firms.

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Nov 7th (day 25): How the next 30 days could play out

November 8th, 2008 by Hang

While most people were focused on the presidential elections, far more interesting IMO was the US Senate elections and the “race for 60″. Briefly, of the 100 US Senators, 50 are required for a majority but 60 are required for a “filibuster proof majority” through which any sort of legislation can be rammed through regardless of dissent from the opposing party.

As of midnight of election day itself, the polls stood at 56 Democratic Senators (including independants Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman in the count) to 40 Republican Senators with 4 election races on the knife edge. As of today, Oregon has been called for the Democrats, Alaska is still counting mail in and absentee votes, Minnesota is going into a mandatory recount and Georgia is going into a mandatory runoff.

There are signs that Alaska could be called for the Democrats in which cases the Democrats would have already grabbed two for two of the swing seats.

Where it gets really interesting is if Minnesota is either called for the Democrats or is still mired in recount and legal woes by December 2nd, at which time Georgia will hold it’s runoff voting. If this is the case, Georgia might just become the most unanticipated important election of the year in terms of how much effect each voter could have.

If Georgia becomes the battleground for the filibuster proof majority, expect the see the might of both the Democratic and Republican National Committee to descend with full force for the biggest get out to vote efforts ever seen.

There are a few things that make me optimistic about the Democrats’ chances in Georgia. For one, the Democrats have conclusively proved that their ground game far outranked the Republicans in the general election and all that infrastructure is still in place. For two, the most lucrative pool of voters to chase after is those of the Libertarian candidate Allen Buckley who drew support away from the Democratic candidate more than the Republican one.

A series of relatively unlikely series of events need to happen for such a scenario to occur but it seems to be not beyond the pale to think that such an election could end up happening. If so, be prepared for a piece of political theatre that will be to the general election what Applejack is to cider.

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