Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I’m not sure how I came across it, but I saw a link to a paper on B.F. Skinner’s self-management skills. Skinner is well-known as the father of behaviorism and for developing operant conditioning, where people simply respond to the environment around them, thus leading his critics to accuse him of denying the existence of free will. The paper I found is written by one of Skinner’s students, defending his work and explaining how Skinner applied the principles to his own life.

The basic idea Skinner used was that by changing his environment, he could change his behavior (my post on “prescriptive context” is pretty similar). So to make himself write, he set up his desk such that everything he needed (dictionaries, references, etc.) was within arm’s reach, so he would never be distracted from his main purpose. He even futzed with the foam in his chair to make it more comfortable so that he would fidget less while writing. All of these sound sensible to me. I really want to track down a copy of his paper “How to Discover What You Have to Say” now, where he offers advice to students on becoming a better writer (”Write every day” is the one I need to get back to).

It’s an interesting read. I’m not going to get into what Skinner’s work means as far as free will. But this paper presents what seem like solid practical tools for changing one’s behavior. And since self-discipline is one of my biggest issues, I’m interested.

P.S. On another subject entirely, Bruno Latour, my favorite French philosopher, is coming to Berkeley next month to give a lecture on his recent book that I reviewed at great length, sponsored by the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium, which looks like it has several other interesting lectures this year. I just found out about the lecture this morning, and I’m totally geeked out about it. I’m going to bring my copy of his book and try to get it signed. I’m such a fanboy.

P.P.S. One of my coworkers today mentioned a book by Schopenhauer called The Art of Always Being Right, laying out thirty eight rhetorical tricks to always win an argument. I’m intrigued enough that I’m leaving a link here to remind myself to track down a copy. Not that I want to be slimy, but it’d be nice to be able to more consciously identify such tricks and thus be less susceptible to them.

I really liked Scott Berkun’s most recent essay, entitled “Why software sucks”. Berkun is a former Microsoft project manager, who’s now an independent author of project management books. I’m not sure where I ran across his web page, but his essays are often interesting and thought-provoking.

I liked the distinction he makes between construction and design, a distinction he draws from architecture.

Good architects, the people who make good buildings, are taught about the difference between construction and design. … Design starts with big strokes: sketches and prototypes for the customer’s experience that take on the big questions about the work (What’s it for? Who’s it for? How might it work? How will we know it’s successful?). Construction is the act of building things with technology. … It starts with small pieces and puts them together to make bigger pieces.”

It reminds me of Clay Shirky’s separation of radial vs. Cartesian thinkers, where Cartesian thinkers look at the big picture from an idealistic point of view, and radial thinkers start with what’s possible and work from there.

It also reminds me a little bit of Lucy Suchman’s distinction between plans and situated actions. Plans are the big picture (aka design), but they can’t fill in all of the details because the actual implementation of the plan (aka construction) requires being situated in the environment where the action will take place.

Berkun emphasizes the importance of being able to move back and forth between design and construction, being able to balance the conflicting realities of programmer and user. Perhaps because I was not trained as a programmer, it seems like I find it easier to accomplish this transition than many programmers, who care about how to make the code clean. As Berkun notes, “To worry about code aesthetics more than the aesthetics of the product itself is akin to a song writer worrying about the aesthetics of the sheet music instead of the quality of the sounds people hear when the band actually plays.”

I don’t really have any deep insight this evening. I just liked the essay, and am somewhat intrigued by this construction vs. design duality mirroring some other dualities that I’ve talked about previously.

My friend Jen pointed me at this column by David Brooks, describing the concept of cultural geography, a field he doesn’t really define, but comes across as the study of how and why different communities believe different things. Given my current belief in the idea that everybody has different realities, she thought I would find it interesting, and I do.

Brooks notes the tendency for people to move “into self-segregating communities with people like themselves”, and the consequential divergence of culture. I wrote about this last year:

But even while these technologies make it easier to support a geographically distributed community, people are redistributing themselves to co-locate their ideological community with their geographic community. These technologies make it easier than ever to find where “people like you” are, as well as providing connections that can be drawn upon to make it easier to move there. So people move to where they feel comfortable.

I think that this tendency towards segmentation is going to encourage growth in two fields of study. One is what Brooks is calling cultural geography, the study of how different culture segments form, what makes them endure and/or prosper, and how they will behave moving forward. The other is what I’ve been calling Latour-ian diplomacy, the ability to process the results of cultural geographers and use their findings to move between different culture segments and communicate and negotiate among them. I think that given the exploding number of culture segments that Brooks observes, the need for diplomacy is becoming stark, because without it, we will be reduced to a state of tribal war, where we treat everybody who is not like us as “evildoers”.

While reading the community post I quoted above, I found a link to another old post of mine about political extremism, which covers this territory:

But the important thing to remember is that nobody is evil in their own minds. They can’t be. They have their reasons for what they’re doing, and they believe in them very strongly. They may have a twisted perspective that is inconceivable to the outsider, but in their own minds, they think they’re doing the right thing. And treating them as monsters will only convince them that you’re a monster yourself, and then we’re back in our ideological fortresses throwing metaphorical Molotov cocktails at each other (or in the case of Palestine and Israel, real explosives).

To make progress, you have to have a flexible enough mind to be able to simulate others’ perspectives, at least enough to open a line of dialogue, to put things in terms that they will understand, to seek avenues of compromise.

Reading that post, it’s both embarrassing and satisfying to realize how little my ideas change from year to year. I’d already identified the idea of diplomacy as being the key. It’s time for me to start fleshing out these ideas and figuring out how to implement them.

There’s been lots of talk echoing around my personal blogosphere recently about the aftermath of the BlogHer conference. In particular, the initial BlogHer session involved discussion over how men tend to network widely but shallowly and women tend to link narrowly but deeply. Given a link-based economy, the former strategy tends to be rewarded more by being rated higher on things like the Technorati 100. This post by Liz Lawley captures some of the follow-up discussion that I’ve read.

I’ve been reading a bunch of these posts over the past few days, and I think there’s been some really interesting discussion over the different attitudes that people take towards linking (danah boyd had an interesting post on the biases of links, for instance). But, in the end, I’m not quite sure what the uproar is about. I guess it’s that tools like Technorati systematically underrate the contribution of women to the blogosphere, because it uses metrics that value things that women don’t care about. This is the principle behind Mary Hodder’s Paris Index.

I guess I have a different perspective than most. Note the title of this post - “my personal blogosphere”. I don’t make any assumptions that everybody’s blogosphere is the same as mine. In fact, one of my recent quixotic causes has been promoting recognition of the fact that we all live in different worlds. There is no one single blogosphere that everybody must subscribe to either in its entirety or not at all.

It may be inevitable that there’s an “A-list” of bloggers (Clay Shirky has a good analysis of the power law phenomenon). But the advantage of the blogosphere is that if I don’t like the A-list, I can ignore them entirely. If I don’t put them on my RSS feed, they might as well not exist. Unlike the world of movies or TV or advertising, where it’s almost impossible to avoid the dominant players, I can read blogs out in the long tail of the distribution and be blissfully ignorant unless something of actual interest goes over one of those dominant channels, and is linked to by one of my feeds

My point is that by creating our own personal blogosphere, we also need to take responsibility for how we create it. If we are subscribing to blogs based on the Technorati 100, it is not Technorati’s fault that our blogroll ends up with biases. We have to recognize that things like the Technorati 100 are merely tools with inherent biases, and it is up to us to use those tools appropriately, recognizing their limitations. I think there could be an argument made that if a certain tool has such an overwhelming presence that it dominates a field (e.g. Google), the creators of that tool have a responsibility to either be utterly transparent about their biases, or endeavor to make the tool as bias-free as possible. However, the former is a far more attainable goal than the latter.

The blogs I read (as seen on the left) have slowly accreted over time, mostly by following links from blogs that I already read or from recommendations from friends or mailing lists. Friend recommendations carry the most weight, obviously. As far as links go, when confronted with a new blog, I often will skim a few posts to see if it is written well and covers topics I find interesting. If so, I’ll generally pick it up for a bit and see where it goes.

I may also be unusual in that I don’t like high volume blogs like BoingBoing or Gizmodo or Slashdot. I am mostly looking for interesting people writing about interesting things: less frequent updates, more thought per post (danah boyd and Christopher Allen are good examples). I don’t want more random links to the rest of the web; I want analysis. And tools like Google and Technorati don’t do a good job of finding such blogs for me; I went and looked at the Technorati 100 for the first time while writing this post, and only 1 of the top 100 is a blog I read regularly. So I don’t use those tools, because they don’t do what I want.

Do I think they should change the tools so that they are useful to me? Not really. Maybe they’re useful for others - who am I to take away their tools? I think Mary Hodder is on the right path in creating her own way of ranking blogs that’s useful to her. We need to create a plethora of alternatives, a toolbox of blog-finding options, so that no matter what kind of content you’re looking for, you can find something appropriate. Perhaps the links-as-a-sign-of-prestige paradigm is so dominant right now that it seems like there are no other options. But with the self-awareness that the BlogHer discussion has enabled, it seems like it’s now up to us to specify the things we find important in blogs, and construct our own tools.

What would be truly ideal is a meta-blog-finder, a tool into which one could input one’s own biases, and it would spit out a personal top 100 blogs. Bloglines has a “Recommendations” page, but it’s way too much like the Technorati list to be of use. But something along those lines, where one inputs blogs that one finds interesting, and it goes and finds other similar blogs, based on the metrics that one specifies, could solve a lot of these disputes. Everybody would have their own top 100 list, and there would no longer be any questions over the biases inherent in the system, because you would be able to specify your biases up front. It’s a pipe dream, sure, but it would be interesting. I guess the next step would be to start reading up on some of the possible metrics for rating blogs, and seeing if there’s a good way to split them up into different axes, so we can construct an N-dimensional blog-characteristic space.

Mary Hodder’s post has some starting ideas for such metrics, but she seems to be more concerned with creating another One True List, whereas I feel that any such list should be personalized to be of interest just for me. I guess the question is, what is the point of creating a list? I want a list that helps me find new blogs. There is a well-defined customer/user (i.e. me) in this scenario that can be designed for. I’m not sure who the customer is for the One True List. Mary mentions in her post that advertisers and PR are trying to find “influential bloggers” - are they the customers? Is it meant to be a list for the BlogHer cohort? It’s very unclear who her target audience is from her post, and therefore it’s going to be hard to design to. As somebody who’s spent a lot of time recently arguing over software specifications, I feel that until you know your target user, it’s going to be hard to settle anything else. One of the advantages of the meta- approach is that the tool can then be tailored to all sorts of different possible target users. Of course, the downside is that creating a general-purpose tool is always harder.

Anyway. There’s clearly some work that can be done to develop some of these ideas. Which reminds me, yet again, that I need to get into the habit of writing more consistently. One of the things I need to remember is that even if I only have a vague idea when I sit down at the computer, it can often be developed into a post while writing. Like tonight, I had originally planned to just link to a bunch of the other posts I’ve been reading because they’re interesting. And yet I managed to extract a relatively coherent post out of it. Well, somewhat coherent. Not completely incoherent? Okay, it’s clearly time to stop. But I’ll pick it up tomorrow. Promise.

I’m too cheap (and don’t do enough cool outdoorsy stuff) to buy a GPS unit to track how far I’ve gone when biking and running and stuff like that. So I was excited when Brad pointed to a tool called Gmap pedometer, which combines a nifty interface with the GPS information contained in Google Maps to let people track how far certain routes are.

For instance, I can now say that my typical jogging route is closer to six miles than the five I thought it was. Which is good to hear, because it takes me around 45-50 minutes to run it, which I thought meant I was running 9-10 minute miles, but means I’m closer to 8 minute miles. (Since I broke a seven minute mile when I was 9 years old and about 4′2″, and could comfortably maintain a 7 minute mile pace for 12 miles when I was 12 years old and 4′10″, the thought that I was 50% slower despite having legs 50% longer was a bit distressing).

Other nifty things I discovered while playing with the tool:

1. My bike route from the BART station at Millbrae to work is about 5 miles. Since I do it in 20-25 minutes, depending on how I hit the traffic lights, I’m making relatively decent time, considering it’s a mountain bike and all.
2. My typical bike route up to Skyline Boulevard is also about 5 miles. Except that it’s all uphill, so it takes more like 50 minutes.
3. The one time I biked from work in San Mateo all the way back up to the Mission district in San Francisco turns out to be a little over 20 miles. I think I did it in about an hour and 40 minutes, so a steady pace of 12 mph or so, which isn’t awful, considering it was mostly upwind and there were a few hills at the end to contend with.

Anyway. Way fun tool. Hours of entertainment. At least for a geek like me.

Three links of interest that I came across today.

• Thomas Friedman wrote a long article about outsourcing for the New York Times magazine, making the point that with new technology, the world is flattening out such that anything can be done anywhere. While I believe outsourcing may be good, and while I am amazed, as always, by the technological leaps necessary to enable it that Friedman describes, I disagree with his basic premise that the world has flattened out. And that’s why I wrote up my last post this evening, so I could refer to it here.

  I agree that it is now technically possible to do these things. But what my previous post indicates, and what I want to develop, is that having the enabling technology will just reveal the really hard task, which is to communicate via that technology. We have only barely started to develop the virtual cues necessary to use such systems, let alone develop the deep connections necessary for effective communication. When developing code, the hard part is often not the code itself, it’s figuring out what the code should do. Outsourcing the actual coding to India is easy…if you know what you want it to do. Figuring out what the code should do is very difficult to outsource, because that’s where the deep shared context is necessary. Even communicating what you want the code to do will be difficult, as anybody that’s spent days trying to write up a decent specification will testify. Just because something is possible doesn’t make it easy. Technology does not trump all. Hrm. I’m not explaining this very well, but I’m going to put it up anyway, and maybe take a stab at sorting it out tomorrow. (And, yes, I know that his main point is that China and India will now be able to do everything themselves rather than American firms outsourcing, but I think that they may have a hard time figuring out what to code anyway without being embedded in their customers’ society).

• Another good Paul Graham essay where he describes some of the company ideas he got for his seed funding firm. This is the bit I like:
  

  But by far the most common was some vague combination of a blog, a calendar, a dating site, and Friendster. Maybe there is some new killer app to be discovered here, but it seems perverse to go poking around in this fog when there are valuable, unsolved problems lying about in the open for anyone to see.

  Since this is exactly where my ideas for social software currently lie, I’m glad I didn’t bother applying. I think we’re going to develop better understanding of what we want in this space over the next few years as more people move more of their communication online, and we start to understand what virtual cues we need, but right now, I agree with him - it’s awfully fuzzy.

• This I Believe essay contest from NPR. Thanks to DocBug for the link. I’m going to have to spend some time trying to get a decent summary of what I believe down to 500 interesting and personal words. Brevity is not my strength - my typical blog post is more in the realm of 1000 words. But I want to try, because (a) I think it’d be a good exercise for me, and (b) it’d be way cool on the off chance I do well enough that I get to read my essay on air.

Damn. I just read about this awesome performance art piece called Look Up More, performed here in New York a week ago Saturday. And I missed it! Damn! I needed better contacts here, apparently. I was about five blocks away when it went off, watching a play. Ah well.

They put volunteers in each of the windows of a massively huge building on the south side of Union Square, and had a conductor outside to coordinate them. They dressed all in black, and on cue, did jumping jacks, danced free style, did a few dance solos, jumping in unison, etc. It’s totally awesome. Check out the video (mp4 format). This is exactly what I need more of in my life. Alas. I am disappointed I missed it, but I’m tempted to sign up for their mailing list just to continue reading about their exploits.

A couple random observations, then more links.

• I was ego surfing today and decided to check on some of the neological phrases I’ve used in this blog. I’m now first on Google for “cognitive subroutines”, “information carnivore”, and “conservative postmodernism”. Of course, nobody but me has really referred to any of those phrases yet. But I will continue to use them, and eventually my wacky brand of punditry will sweep across the nation, carried by such phrases.
• Here’s a random observation that a co-worker and I made a while ago. I don’t remember how we got onto the topic, but for some reason we started listing off firms that had achieved success through business process innovation rather than technical innovation. Names at the top of the list: Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks. All from Seattle. We have no idea what this means. But it’s kind of curious. And, yes, while writing this up, I realized that there are plenty of other companies that could qualify here that weren’t started in Seattle, like Dell, but I’m trying to make a point here. Even if I don’t know what that point is.
• Another friend pointed me to this essay by Bob Laughlin, a physics professor down at Stanford. I like some of Laughlin’s ideas, although I think he expresses them unclearly (a characteristic which I found to be true the one time I took a class with him). I like the idea of emergent behavior, from the science of networks to sync, or, as he puts it, “that the organization can acquire meaning and life of its own and begin to transcend the parts from which it is made.” However, while I agree in principle with Laughlin’s assertion that there will always be new physics to explore, I don’t believe that physics is where relevant science is going to come from for the foreseeable future, unless you count complexity theory and other emergent behavior studies under physics. Then again, I dropped out of physics, so it’s not surprising I dismiss it as a field of interest.
• From the New York Times (registration required), A heart-breaking story about the downward spiral of drug addiction. It’s just not controllable. And there’s nothing anybody can do once you’re in the spiral.
• I think this Wired article, describing the shift from the “Information Age” to the “Conceptual Age”, captures a lot of my ambivalence towards programming right now. And why I want to become a pundit. Or at least some sort of systems-level thinker.
• The Flickr Color Picker. Flickr is a neat idea - it’s the del.icio.us of photos (or vice versa) - but this is a neat little app on top of it that lets you choose a color, and it collects photos with that color dominant. Just a nifty little toy that brings a smile to one’s face.
• fac.etio.us is a cute take on how to take advantage of the tags of del.icio.us, and let users slice the data in various ways by partitioning based a sequence of user choices. I like the idea because it reflects how I think our brains actually work.
• Seth Green on Fresh air. Seth Green was Oz on Buffy, of course. He’s the Kevin Bacon of his generation, having been in a wide variety of films with pretty much every other actor of his age group. It was fun listening to him and finding out that he’s pretty much just as laconic and dryly funny as Oz.
• I like this description of being a micro-Medici, a patron in the mold of the great Medici family of the Renaissance, but on a smaller scale. I tend to subscribe to this theory as well; when I see a band I like, I buy their CD or a T-shirt. I’ve given money to web comics that I enjoy, especially when I hear that the creator is trying to go full-time like Questionable Content. With the web and Paypal, it’s so easy to make a quick donation that there’s no reason not to. And it makes me feel good, too.

We’ll return to your regularly scheduled rants about obscure topics tomorrow when I’m not braindead from trying to figure out my finances.

• In his latest article, Christopher Allen takes on a question that I struggled with at one point: how do we handle our social networks when they grow too large? Too large, in this case, is defined with respect to Dunbar’s Number. Some interesting thoughts, especially on how we handled the problem in a pre-technology age. Part of the issue which I don’t think he addresses is that the current social networking services don’t have any graceful way for us to rate our strength of relationship. In real life, I spend more time with my close circle of friends than with certain other acquaintances. I may like those acquaintances, but I won’t go out of my way to see them, or I will only interact with them in certain defined contexts such as chorus or ultimate. With the publicly articulated crude tools currently available online, though, I can’t distinguish between those two “friend” relationships without offending the acquaintances. It’s a tough question. Nuance is lost online, especially in the realm of autistic social software.
• Speaking of autistic social software, danah boyd just gave a talk at Terry Winograd’s HCI seminar at Stanford. I really liked that seminar series when I was at Stanford, and attended a bunch of the talks there. Alas, I could not get down there yesterday to see danah speak, but fortunately the video of the talk is available online, so I just watched it. Nothing too surprising, given that I read her blog and a lot of her informally published work, but it was kind of neat to see her talk. Now that I know Winograd’s seminar is online, as well as Rheingold’s, I think I’ll be wasting time watching those instead of TV. Or at least I should.
• I still haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (it’s in the Amazon order that I’m going to submit soon), but he keeps on popping up in weird places. Like this interview on ESPN.com, where he’s asked to apply his theories of thin-slicing to analyzing the Super Bowl.
• And, as usual, you can see other links that I’ve found that were worth bookmarking, but not interesting enough to comment on, over on del.icio.us.

I’ve ranted before on the importance of a clear message in politics. And that the Democrats were lacking that in the last election. It seems that I am not the only one who made that observation. A group called 2020 Democrats has started a website called The Principles Project, which is “an effort to develop a one page statement of principles that summarizes what we as progressives stand for.” It’s pretty interesting. They posted a draft, went through a round of revision, and are inviting comments on the second draft this week. I poked around for a bit, and added a couple comments of my own. I think it’s a pretty decent stab at a coherent statement of progressive principles. I don’t fully agree with it, but it’s closer than anything else I’ve seen. So take a look and see what you think.