Another variation of the ‘cognitive trap,’ David Weiss explores the inverse relation between confidence and knowledge—again through the lens of software development, sort of the zebrafish of organization psychology.

David Weiss: Metacognitive Miscalibration

He goes on to characterize several cases of the miscalibration of confidence and thinking. “Wicked Problems” could be considered as similar to those physics problems you first struggled to complete in high school, which helpfully neglected messy factors like air resistance at the expense of effective accuracy. As you add in all of the variables required by the actual underlying complexity, the problem eventually collapses. The “Desire to Learn” dovetails with the previously linked Raganwald predicament, where a sense of sufficient knowledge forestalls efforts to deepen understanding. “Personal Pride” evokes the admonition common in entrepreneurship and venture capital to “fail quickly” and not let fear of failure paralyze you.

Finally, the “Well Intended Deception” describes a situation more specific to software programming where levels of abstraction can hide deeper problems—sometimes an emphasis on simplicity through inheriting framework code results in an offset in opacity. The upfront ease of using pre-made tools and resources can be undone by the lack of transparency into what’s really going on when you need to dig into the details. This is a balancing act, as it’s often more efficient to build on proven platforms and add just distinguishing features as custom effort. Thus a new product like Pixelmator, even with only one designer and one developer, can usurp some of the mighty Adobe Photoshop’s turf by building on established open-source and Apple-provided APIs. The parallel in videogame development is whether to build one’s own engine, a la Id Software, or license a middleware product like the Unreal Engine. The former gains full optimization and customization options at the cost of major additional engineering effort; the latter can focus on just a specific game’s logic rather than the underlying plumbing, but remain fundamentally limited by the licensed engine’s capabilities.

This ‘buy or build’ decision ripples through most manufacturing processes. Despite its long history of ‘Not Invented Here‘ myopia, Apple has lately shown a great deal of maturity in this area, with the move to Intel processors freeing up engineering to focus on new products like the iPhone and Apple TV; yet their recent purchase of P.A. Semi also shows that they intend to maintain a toehold at the lower levels of chip design.

One of the small joys of introspection is identifying those cognitive traps that restrict our growth. This ego-spelunking process has featured prominently in Western philosophy within the role of the skeptic (e.g. Descartes); in Eastern disciplines such as Buddhism; and in various self-help tomes that provide a mash-up of both (e.g. Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior). In laying out the idiosyncratic ‘metaphysics of Quality’ in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig proposes a related concept called the ‘gumption trap’ which siphons off your enthusiasm when you encounter “affective, cognitive and psychomotor blocks” in performing a task.

Reginald Braithwaite discusses what might be characterized as one of these self-limiting habits:

Why we are the biggest obstacles to our own growth

This begins by riffing on an observation made by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber in analyzing the import of the mainstream success of Apple among youth, which has now filtered down from the obvious case to financial analysis. Braithwaite carries the idea in a more professional direction, namely that what you know often interferes with your acceptance of something you don’t. Building up a degree of expertise in any discipline means you have potentially more to lose – in comfort and initial efficiency at least – when switching to a novel alternative. Braithwaite’s examples are specific to software programming (Lisp vs Factor, regular expressions in Ruby) but the principle can be applied more broadly. The effects can be seen in resistance to new technologies or methodologies, resulting in foot-dragging up through overt sabotage reminescent of Luddites.

The solution at the individual level is to learn how to stretch, just as you do to extend physical reach. This can mean challenging long-accepted notions on technique that may no longer be the pinnacle solutions they once were, particularly when crossing disciplines—keeping with the software design idea, , for example, when switching from procedural to object-oriented programming. At the group level, extra attention should be paid to transitional aids and training to help lower the resistance borne out of knee-jerk anxiety triggered by a perceived threat to one’s identity.

[EB: Luddite]

In an article last February on software development culture, eWeek’s Peter Coffee made reference to a maxim on complexity: “Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.” The source was John Gall’s 1978 work called Systemantics, a kind of satire of General Systems Theory that simultaneously mocked and catalogued the tendencies of systems to create their own problems. With its title taken from a mash-up of systematic, semantic, and ’system antic,’ the book laid out a quite illuminating series of ‘laws’ that afflict systems in the same fashion that the Peter Principle underlies corporate hierarchy, Conway’s Law outlines the effect of committees, and Murphy’s Law describes probability—in fact, one law is that “a complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways” which essentially encapsulates Murphy. Gall also ventures into policy, arguing for a much broader understanding of global concerns as being generated by underlying systems:

“The religious person may blame it on original sin. The historian may cite the force of trends such as population growth and industrialization. The sociologist offers reasons rooted in the peculiarities of human associations. Reformers blame it all on ‘the system,’ and propose new systems that would, they assert, guarantee a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point—that their own system would work very well if only it were universally adopted.

The point of view espoused in this essay is more radical and at the same time more pessimistic. Stated as succinctly as possible: the fundamental problem does not lie in any particular system but rather in systems as such. Salvation, if it is attainable at all, even partially, is to be sought in a deeper understanding of the ways of systems, not simply in a criticism of the errors of a particular system.”

Other references to Systemantics include excerpts of the 3rd edition (renamed The System Bible) via Amazon’s Online Reader—for example, you can browse the entire “Index of Horrible Examples” from Czar Alexander to Three Mile Island and the Titanic—and collected references via del.icio.us. Regrettably Amazon does not actually sell any of the 3 editions, but another company called General Systemantics advertises copies for sale (via a default MS FrontPage theme, itself fodder for a whole article on system failure) along with the brilliantly epigrammatic praise by William Safire that “Work books gall, but Gall’s book works.”

More contemporary parallels to Gall’s work include Donella Meadows’ Twelve Leverage Points which describe a scale of effective places “to intervene in a system,” alternately thought of as levers by which you can affect the workings of a complex system; Edward Tenner’s book Why Things Bite Back on the ‘revenge effects’ or unintended consequences of technology; Jared Diamond’s book Collapse on possible causes of failed societies; and Anti-patterns, an outgrowth of Design Patterns that have been utilized in fields like architecture and software design to find well-solved problems and re-use them. Most anyone who’s held a job can probably relate to one or more organization or management anti-patterns, which also includes longstanding concepts such as “moral hazard” from economics and “scope creep” from project management.

[EB: Systems Engineering]

The Encyclopedia Britannica has launched a program allowing free access to their online edition for ‘web publishers’ and their readers. I have submitted gray/matter for registered access, which if approved will allow you to read any linked articles without an account. The goal is to provide some alternative background references besides the obligatory Wikipedia, which arguably outstrips the EB in breadth but not in depth or validation (the crux being Wikipedia’s uneven record for veracity).

britannicanet.com

No word yet on whether WebShare access would allow anything like A. J. Jacobs’ quest to become The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by reading through the entire collection.

As the article itself states, "The title is all the intro you should need."

Why Superman Will Always Suck – Bam! Kapow!

The argument against Superman as a sympathetic character is just as appropriate for any overpowered hero, such as the cited ‘Burly Brawl’ between Neo and the mob of Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded.

As counterexamples, however, excluding Kingdom Come (which also comes in for bashing at the article’s end) the notion of Superman has seen some  compelling permutations via conceits like Elseworlds. A few include JLA’s The Nail, wherein a nail punctures the tire of the Kents and prevents them from reaching the infant Kal-El first, who is instead raised among the Amish; Red Son, where he is raised in the Soviet Union instead of the US; and the revamped Squadron Supreme (released as Supreme Power) parallel universe where an invulnerable alien foundling is raised under strict government control to become Hyperion. Two more meta alternatives are Secret Identity, where a smalltown teen has the misfortune of being named ‘Clark Kent’ in a world raised on Superman comics…until he suddenly develops real powers; and It’s a Bird, an autobiographical tale of a new writer (Steven Seagle) deciding how to tackle such as iconic character with any meaningful modern perspective.

For related Superman entertainment, there’s always the quintessential essay by Larry Niven about the myriad obstacles facing his sex life – "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" – that recalls engineering disproofs of Santa Claus which feature reindeer traveling 3,000 times the speed of sound.

More recent fare can be found in the Michael Chabon’s piece "Secret Skin" (subtitled "an essay in unitard theory") in the New Yorker which explores the absurdity of superhero costuming – a fuller realization of the "No capes!" rant by supersuit doyenne Edna Mode in The Incredibles.

Nick Paumgarten’s piece on “the lives of elevators” starts and ends with the tragic tale of Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator back in 1999. But the story is really about the science of vertical people-movers, which enable the high-rise and thus urban architecture itself – “two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator.”

Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down: Reporting & Essays

The essay covers the safety features and record of elevators, their basic construction, their efficiency of design and energy. Their role in media, even the dearth of elevator poetry, are mentioned (along with a perfectly appropriate use of ‘vertiginous’), with the observation that as a plot device, it serves:

“…to bring characters together, as a kind of artificial enforcement of proximity and conversation. The brevity of the ride suits the need for a stretch of witty or portentous dialogue, for stolen kisses and furtive arguments. For some people, the elevator ride is a social life.”

We learn of the elevator variant of claustrophobia and behavioral elevator therapy. We meet vertical transportation consultants like James Fortune, who engineer a building’s ‘elevatoring’ – its handling of ‘human traffic.’ The science of elevator planning is built on physics of space and psychology of time, plus the probabilities of human behavior. The elevatoring plan of a building must keep wait times at a minimum, while allowing for cultural constraints on human proximity (measured by calculations such as the average ‘body ellipse,’ which vary between Western and Eastern even as they do between urban and rural notions of ‘personal space’) and using as little room as possible to impact the building’s overall architecture. New innovations such as ‘destination dispatch’ pre-program floor routing based on rider pools, but at the cost of the illusion of user control over elevator movement. Meanwhile, fundamental limits such as cable length – any climb higher than 1700 feet and the hoist rope will snap under its own weight – require innovations like sky lobbies to act as transfer points midway up towers that can now scale a mile high.

Outside of the article, Paumgarten also recently appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation where it’s mentioned that his ongoing assignment is to cover ‘journeys’ which at least explains how traveling up and down got coverage.

For my part, the only operator-run elevator still in service I can recall using is at the San Francisco Rasputin’s music store, where the upper floors are only accessible by rattletrap conveyance operated by precisely the kind of adjunct indie clerk you’d expect to work in a SF music store. So instead of only feeling defensive when you check out, you also have to weigh checking out another floor’s genre against the calculated disapproval you may detect in the implicit scoff of their pressing the button.

As for the science, elevatoring has already made a notable appearance in two games – the original SimTower (scheduled for re-release on Nintendo DS!) and its sequel, Yoot Tower. Many of the stated tips for good vertical building design – keeping cafeterias at ground level, adroit use of stairways and escalators – factored into gameplay, and key to success was sufficient elevatoring. Too few, and lines would grow at each floor’s chokepoint, and your sims would rapidly turn red; or your maids wouldn’t be able to clean all the hotel rooms and turn them before the next check-in; or, heaven forfend, your fire escape plan would fall short. Too many ‘vators and you blew your budget for that top floor cathedral. Perhaps all those hours I spent trying to ferry customers from a 40th floor cinema to the 3rd floor gift shops without affecting the hotel clientele has a practical outlet after all.

[Somewhat apropos, I just had a track by concept band Towering Inferno - not to be confused with The Towering Inferno - play while writing this.]

Pursuit of alternative energy sources has at last been broadly renewed. The new interest is primarily driven by the run-up in oil prices, now at their highest point in history in inflation-adjusted dollars (at the peak during the 1979 energy crisis, the adjusted cost per barrel was about $80, the same as back in 2006; the highest peak overall in 1864 topped out at $100). Previously the two major retardants of alternative energy research, mutually reinforcing, were the high relative cost of non-fossil-fuel sources and lobbying efforts by oil/gas producers to divert funds towards subsidizing their industry to maintain low costs. Naturally, the relative cost would not drop without further research improvements, and potential research funds were siphoned off or diminished by powerful lobbying efforts, maintaining the status quo.

The combined pressures of the latest oil crisis, foreign wars fought in oil-rich nations, and the looming spectre of global warming have revitalized a new coalition of green interests built on a shared platform of energy independence, sustainable practice, and environmental sensitivity. With the playing field levelled somewhat by the 400%+ increase in oil costs in the last 20 years, alternative sources start to look more competitive. We’ve seen resurgences of efforts to tap into wind, wave, geothermal, and solar power although all are still in fledgling stages of deployment and remain largely limited geographically. One new approach, however, is to capture solar energy not via photovoltaics to convert it to electricity, but via photosynthesis to produce fuel oils.

Algae: The ultimate in renewable energy

The lipid oil produced by about half of the algae’s weight appears on the face to be much more efficient (100,000 gallons per acre per year via Valcent’s vertical method) to produce than current biodiesel efforts via corn ethanol (30 gallons) or soybean oil (50 gallons). Moreover, the recent surge in food prices due to diversion of arable land to corn ethanol at the cost of corn-based foodstocks and other food crops further disadvantage it as a viable long-term fuel source. Traditional agriculture also remains tied into the petroleum industry due to the use of petro-based pesticides, which along with plastics are other large segments of petroleum usage that must be replaced to cut completely the ties to imported oil.

I wonder just how much closer we could come to overcoming our ‘addiction to oil’ described by President Bush if we were to recreate something like Kissinger’s Project Independence which came out of the first OPEC crisis, and was modeled after the Manhattan Project and perhaps Kennedy’s space program. Already with the recent collapse of the experimental installation for ‘zero-emission coal-fired plants’ pushed as part of the now two-year-old Advanced Energy Initiative, only ‘clean, safe’ nuclear energy and solar/wind technologies remain as focii for the modest increase in DOE research. Even less has been said about results in proposed research on hybrid batteries and cellulosic ethanol production.

Other Resources

NPR’s Talk of the Nation has had recent shows on the potential of solar power, which suggested that a single hypothetical installation of 100 square miles in the American Southwest could provide the entire country’s energy needs; the infusion of charcoil into soil to improve crop yields while acting as a carbon sink; and exploring alternatives to producing biofuels (although algae did not appear to be included).

WBUR’s On Point has also covered the role of technology in energy policy; the prospects for ‘clean coal’ in the wake of wavering support by the Bush administration; and coverage of National Geographic’s recent documentary on the American climate ‘footprint.’

Among the flood of recent stories via CNN on autism and related spectrum disorders like Asperger’s syndrome (the debate over vaccines, links to a common sperm donor, the effectiveness of dietary treatment, and various anecdotal stories) was a report on therapeutic efforts within Second Life.

‘Naughty Auties’ battle autism with virtual interaction

When virtual reality (VR) was first demonstrated in the early 90s by early proponents like Jaron Lanier, one of the proposed benefits was for psychological treatment of nervous disorders such as phobias. One of the behavioral treatments for phobias is systemic desensitization, with gradual exposure to the triggering stimulus in a safe environment to re-condition the response. A VR environment can duplicate the phobic stimulus in varying degrees to acclimatize the patient to remaining calm.  A recent study covered in the British Journal of Psychiatry also used VR to observe paranoid spectrum behavior. The use of a VR environment for autism spectrum disorders is a parallel example of systemic sensitization, allowing individuals to practice social interactions and gain confidence in communicating in a protective simulacrum of real life.

Second Life also perhaps represents Lanier’s hope for the future of VR beyond its early roots in static gaming (e.g. BattleTech Centers) and corporate simulations for CAD and oil/gas modeling:

“The main element lacking in video games (compared to what I hope we’ll see in virtual reality) is an expressive power. And so, what I envision is not so much a pre-programmed virtual world that you might play as a game, but rather a virtual world that you can change from the inside; a world that people use as a form of expression, in which they’re creating things together. Just as people make up their own Web pages, they would make up little realities and visit each other’s realities, or co-create them. And I think that level of activity would give rise to really, really wonderful new sorts of human relationships and experiences.”

(Sun interview, The Future of Virtual Reality)

A recurring example of the self-defeating nature of political handling of economics is the looming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. Like energy issues, the problems have been identified for decades but political will favors short-term spending to gin up reelection support at the expense of long-term planning. So the government borrows against the programs’ surplus during flush times to support present concerns such as corporate subsidies and defense spending, leaving the difference to be made up during someone else’s term. The demographic event of Baby Boomer retirement will also strain the system precisely when incoming payments will see a dramatic decline. The current projection has Medicare insolvent by 2019 (Social Security will hold up until something like 2041), and the growth of the two programs would eventually consume all federal revenue (a parallel to the growing weight of interest on the national debt). Yet any proposal to address the underlying factors by raising taxes, reforming health care, restricting or delaying benefits, or rolling back subsidies or other spending all have unpleasant political consequences, hence the characterization of Social Security and Medicare as the ‘third rail’ of politics.

The $53 trillion asteroid

The comments to the article fall into two, largely partisan groups – those who place the blame on Republican spending and rail against the establishment, and those who blame Democratic spending and call for tangential conservative planks such as expelling illegal immigrants, repealing the Teachers’ Union, etc. More instructive are comparative discussions of programs in Canada and Australia and how they’ve dealt with their own respective shortfalls.

Movie & TV News @ IMDb.com – Studio Briefing – 7 April 2008

“Jericho, the CBS television series that was canceled because of low ratings, then revived following protests from fans, then canceled again because of low ratings, may be revived a second time, the New York Times reported today (Monday). The newspaper said that CBS may follow NBC’s recent example with Friday Night Lights in which it sold the DirecTV satellite service the right to air the series before it goes on network TV. The Times said that CBS is considering a similar option in negotiations with cable provider Comcast. Meanwhile, although DirecTV executives have expressed confidence that the Friday Night Lights deal could drive new subscribers to their service, some analysts are expressing skepticism about its ability to do so and forecasting that the DirecTV episodes will wind up being pirated on the Internet.”

This sounds like Comcast would effectively underwrite the show’s production in return for first-run rights. The twice-over cancellation of Jericho is already a testament to the lag between current media trends and viewer metrics that in turn drive advertising buys. CBS cancelled after the promised 7 episodes of season 2, citing low ratings, while also noting high consumption via non-broadcast channels including DVRs and online streaming which are not factored into Nielsen shares. This plus the creative “Nuts!” campaign that led to the second season point to a dedicated, evangelistic audience as represented on fansites like Jericho Lives. It may be that Jericho would do better on a cable network in any event, with more targeted demographics, smaller share requirements, and potentially less network restrictions on story points.