FretDFire's WebLog

The Fisherman's Approach

FretDFire — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 16:35:00 GMT

Edward Albee wrote in his play THE ZOO STORY "sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly."

Another way to to think of it is this excerpt from Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty: Graphics From an Unseen World by Clifford A. Pickover, 1990. Seems to me to have relevance for the blogosphere...

Sometimes I consider myself a fisherman. Computer programs and ideas are the hooks, rods and reels. Computer pictures are the trophies and delicious meals. A fisherman does not always know what the waters will yield; however a fisherman may know where the fishing is good, where the waters are fertile, what type of bait to use. Often the specific catch is a surprise, and this is the enjoyment of the sport. There are no guarantees. There are often unexpected pleasures. Readers are urged to participate by dipping into unknown waters. Hopefully, readers will enjoy looking at the catches or dissecting them further to learn more about their internal structures.

Inbox = Times Square

FretDFire — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 20:15:00 GMT

Bruce Sterling had it right - "Reading my e-mail now is like walking through Times Square at the height of the porn boom. It's genuinely sinister. There is this parade of thieves, hookers, fraudsters and viruses."

Tao of Poker

FretDFire — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 15:35:00 GMT

I'm thinking that the art of successful project management at Microsoft can be pretty well described by substituting "project management" for "poker" in the excerpts below from: The Tao of Poker: 285 Rules to Transform Your Game and Your Life, by Larry W. Phillips.

POKER RULE #78: "When somebody bets into you, strongly, or raises you, look at them and ask yourself the following question: How serious are they?"

What is their level of commitment? There is a certain "solidity" to when a player really has the goods-- a kind of wall-like solidity of purpose. It usually has a kind of Mt. Rushmore look to it. Look also for smoothness, naturalness, ease of movement-- mannerisms that show they are proceeding quite confidently without much fear at all.

Another way of asking the same question might be: "Am I beat?" In fact, most opponents will tell you, with their body language, demeanor and betting, whether you are about to lose (or whether they are “ahead” of you in the hand). But you must hear it—and you must be able to act on the answer.

In low-limit games, try to move your poker play in the direction of matching your "folds" to how certain your opponents seem to be that they are about to win.

POKER RULE #80: “Mastering yourself.”

At the more advanced levels of poker, mastering yourself becomes a key part of the game. This is because at this level of play you already know the game, and so do your opponents, and everybody is approximately equal. The person who masters himself is the one who gains an important edge.

POKER RULE #91: "A player who is good enough to win is also good enough to break even."

It's a funny thing about talent-- it can be used for more than just winning. Or for less.

Violinist Itzak Perlman could use his violin talent to play "Lady of Spain" in a subway station. Bill Gates could use his computer knowledge to become a very good computer repairman, if he so decided. Pro golfer Tiger Woods could use his talent to play with one arm tied behind his back. (Or to play drunk.)

All these peoples' talents could be used for less than optimum purposes. Make sure some variation of this isn't happening to you. Don't hamper the abilities you have by deliberately handicapping yourself in some way—spotting your opponents some advantage through casualness, playfulness, lack of attention, or indifference.

POKER RULE #95: "The curiosity trap."

You’ve got your poker radar set up to guard against sloppy play. You’ve "steeled" yourself against this and most of the other well-known traps and pitfalls: tilt, “chasing”, anger, revenge, impatience… but how about curiosity? Are your defenses set up for curiosity? Curiosity-- such a small thing, so ordinary and innocent that we hardly notice it-- can sometimes slip underneath our radar.

It's not a highly visible threat. It's not raging emotions. It’s not tilt. Just simple garden-variety curiosity... But it can be just as deadly because it keeps us in too long, staying until the end to see what another player has...

Microsoft patents body power

FretDFire — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 19:33:00 GMT

I love this company. Thniking about innovation these days and noticed the excerpt below from http://www.zdnet.co.uk/

Microsoft has been awarded a patent for using human skin as a power conduit and data bus.

Patent No. 6,754,472, which was published Tuesday, describes a method for transmitting power and data to devices worn on the body and for communication of data between those devices.

Personal area networks -- or PANs -- are nothing new. Some, such as Bluetooth, use radio signals, while others use infrared. Some work has been done on near-field intrabody communications -- most notably by IBM's Almaden Research Labs, which at Comdex '96 demonstrated a prototype device that let two people exchange electronic business cards by shaking hands.

IBM's work, which was led by Thomas Zimmerman, took advantage of the natural salinity of the human body, which makes it an excellent conductor of electrical current. IBM's device, which was the size of a pack of playing cards, used a current of one-billionth of an amp (one nanoamp) -- lower than the natural currents already in the body -- to transmit data at the equivalent rate of an old 2400-baud modem, though speeds of up to 400,000 bits per second were mooted.

<what's "mooted"?>

Furthermore, said Microsoft, the physical resistance offered by the human body could be used to create a virtual keyboard on a patch of skin.

You bought it. Who controls it?

FretDFire — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:16:00 GMT

More thoughts on innovation from Edward Tenner, June 2003 http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2003/jul/01/life/20030701lif4.html

…The tamperproofing that some technology companies are now putting in place threatens a tradition of user-centered innovation. Incapacitating designs will slam the door on these vital superthinnkers.

...Incapacitation would also limit the academic training of the companies' future technical staff. Freedom to tinker - defined by Felten as "your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technology devices that you own" - benefits technology industries most of all. Even the film industry needs young people who have had free access to the nuts and bolts of digital graphics and special effects, and I'll bet that Microsoft doesn't make its young Xbox game-programming recruits sign an affidavit that they have never violated an end-user license agreement. New hardware security is manifestly a good idea for servers with sensitive information. There is a good case for new levels of protection… for those vulnerable sites. But if they extend incapacitation too far, the builders of the Trojan mouse may find themselves caught in their own trap.

Kill the Operating System!

FretDFire — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:09:00 GMT

More thinking about innovation. Wanted to share this excerpt from the article titled "Kill the Operating System! When designing computers, companies could take a lesson from Hollywood" by By Simson Garfinkel. The Net Effect September 2003

You use Windows, I use a Mac, and we both know people who use GNU/Linux. But for all the differences between these three families of computer operating systems, they implement the same fundamental design; all are equally powerful, and equally limiting.

Virtually every operating system in use today is based on a single computer system architecture developed in the 1960s and ’70s. This architecture divides code running on computers into a “kernel,” responsible for controlling the computer’s hardware, and so-called application programs, which are loaded into the computer’s memory to perform individual tasks. Applications, in turn, operate on named files arranged in a tree of folders. True, there are a few niche operating systems that don’t adhere to this tripartite structure, but they are but bit players on the digital stage. Even PalmOS has a kernel, apps, and files (which PalmOS mistakenly calls “databases”). It’s almost inconceivable that this approach won’t be the dominant paradigm for many years to come. And that’s a deep problem for the future of computing.

Hollywood, though, has a better idea.

….It’s not such a far-fetched notion. Alas, the convenient It wouldn’t take much to enable today’s computers to store every version of every document they have ever been used to modify: most people perform fewer than a million keystrokes and mouse clicks each day; a paltry four gigabytes could hold a decade’s worth of typing and revisions if we stored those keystrokes directly, rather than using the inefficient Microsoft Word document format. Abstractions of directories and files make it difficulty for designers to create something different. With a little thought, though, we could do far better. Hollywood has dreamed it; now Silicon Valley needs to make it real.

burn the house to roast the pig

FretDFire — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 16:42:00 GMT

Thinking about innovation today, and censorship. The excerpt below by Lawrence Lessig from RED HERRING 11/02 won't go out of my head...

In 1930, 10,027 books were published. Today, 0 those books are still in print. What would it take to put the remaining 9,853 out-of-print books on the internet?

Later in the article...

As the Supreme Court once said about a statute that banned all indecent speech so that children would not be exposed, we don’t “burn the house to roast the pig.”

Lessons on Accountability from the Football Field

FretDFire — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 16:35:00 GMT

I'm currently reading the management book THE RADICAL LEAP by Steve Farber. I was reminded of the excerpt below from from http://www.chasmgroup.com/underthebuzz.htm

Lessons on Accountability from the Football Field

(From a discussion with Steve Young, former 49'ers Quarterback)

Since his retirement from the NFL in 2000, Steve Young, former Superbowl-winning quarterback for the San Francisco 49'ers, has begun to fashion what he learned in professional football about the importance of individuals taking responsibility for their actions - even to the extent of turning apparently impossible game situations around - into a highly relevant theme for businesses to learn from.

Young make a persuasive case that, besides being 'just a game', football is a real laboratory of human experience with particular value for leadership and teamwork in all activities of consequence, especially including business. Below are some examples of quotes from the conversation we had when Young visited our firm's offices several weeks ago. One telling lesson for us as we listened to his analogies between the sports field and business, was that businesses would be much more successful if they practiced to a similar extent that professional footballers do, instead of managing by the seat of their pants (go on, admit it, this does occasionally happen in high-tech organizations!). In a parallel between sports and war, Young reminded us that although "armies practice a lot, when combat starts, all hell breaks loose", thus inferring that practice is especially critical if you are in a fight for survival, despite the likelihood that a certain amount of disordered conflict is likely to ensue.

Read on for more instructive parallels from Young regarding sports and 'real life':

On learning to find the 'invisible' receiver:

"People don't realize perhaps that, when you are a 6'1" quarterback, there are many times when you can't see the receivers, because of these enormous defensive backs coming at you and blocking your view. After missing a number of times in the early days and being asked why, I would say: 'I couldn't see the receiver!' The response invariably was, 'Well, you'd better find a way to see him'. After spending some time puzzling over this, I started throwing to where I hoped or expected the receiver to be. I would act on the last sighting I had, and became a player who could play blind."

On not seeing the results of a great play:

"I started it, but because of those huge human beings coming at me and occasionally sacking me, I didn't get to see the result of my throw … but I would then find out that something great had happened. To do this, I learned to make my living as a quarterback by reading the receiver's body language. One of the reasons that (Jerry) Rice is such a great receiver is that he transmits great body language - he probably doesn't realize it, but he does. This whole thing about passing blind and reading body language taught me a lot about the importance of having faith in your team-mates."

On never being able to do enough to satisfy some people's requirements:

"Despite my attempts to explain how difficult it was to get the ball to him, Jerry Rice would curve his arms close to his body in a ball-catching pose, and say, 'That's OK, but … (I need the ball) right here!"

On being accountable:

"One of the critical things about being a quarterback is that you have to realize that the whole team is working to protect you and provide this cocoon around you; so you have to do just one thing - which is, do something good with the ball. But when you get intercepted (as I was 202 times in my NFL career), everyone kinda freezes and just looks at you … If that's all that happens, everyone slumps their shoulders and goes off the field, feeling pretty deflated. What I learned from these painful occurrences is how critical it is to rally the team, and it's really quite simple to do. I would just say 'I screwed up. It won't happen again, so let's go back to the touchline, get a drink of water, come back out ready to play, and kick their asses!'"

On what happens when no one is accountable:

"In the absence of (at least) one person being accountable, you get a sudden vacuum, into which a swarm of opinions fly; soon, political camps form, team spirit and resolution dissolves, and you can quickly suffer the downward spiral toward defeat."

Toward the end of our meeting, I was reminded for no particular reason of the contrasting situation in which people fail to accept full accountability for their decisions and actions, preferring instead to blame others. This is neatly summarized in a popular saying about certain types of soccer coach in Brazil, whose attitude regarding accountability is exemplified by the 'person' they use when alluding to contrasting results obtained over time by the teams they were responsible for coaching to victory: "I won. We tied. They lost."

The lessons brought out by Steve Young undoubtedly have value for business leaders, especially at a time when blame and accusation are flying back and forth regarding the accounting fraud, insider trades, and other excesses committed by company executives during the recent economic boom and bubble. At a time when American society has also been hit hard by the 9/11 attacks of a year ago, people seem to have a clearer sense of what it means to be responsible for one's actions. And, for managers and executives in technology companies, where exercising accountability for missed goals, targets and deadlines is often an elusive aspiration, the image of someone on the football field understanding so clearly where their responsibility begins and ends - as Young clearly did - should serve as some kind of example.

The Threat of Pigeons and Other Fundamentalists

FretDFire — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 16:07:00 GMT

I cut the below excerpt from FAST COMPANY in July 2003. I still find it thought provoking. Do you? BOLD text below is my emphasis added.

The Threat of Pigeons and Other Fundamentalists,

Skinner was right: You can make a pigeon superstitious. Just put it in a cage and arrange for food to appear at regular intervals. Whatever the pigeon happens to be doing just as the food arrives—sitting around, bobbing its head, whatever—it will keep doing, over and over again, in the hope that the dance caused the food to appear. The pigeon will assume a cause-and-effect relationship that doesn’t really exist. That’s what a superstition is: a compulsion to take an action that has no influence on the desired outcome. Pigeons are superstitious, and I’m afraid that most of us are as well. There’s plenty we do—plenty we’ve always done—that has nothing to do with what actually works. But once we’ve made up our minds, we’re like pigeons. We don’t want to change our behavior, regardless of how much data we see to support a new and better alternative. It’s easier to be superstitious, easier to hope that the food will just slide out of the dispenser when we spin around and around.

We don’t expect a pigeon to wise up and change its behavior. But what about your boss? Have you ever had a boss who said, “I’ve looked at all the best thinking on [insert issue here: factory expansion, layoffs, global warning, stem- cell research, foreign trade], and I’m going to change my mind; my old position was wrong, and this is what we should do instead”? Or is your boss, well, more like a pigeon?

I’ve got nothing against pigeons. The problem comes when superstitions belong to people in power—when superstitions become the operating system for major companies and other important institutions.

People in power usually want to stay there. And one way they think they can do this is by enforcing rigid adherence to a set of principles that they believe are responsible for their organization’s success. By requiring employees to abide by these superstitions—better known as company policies—rather than examining the facts, they build organizations that appear streamlined. In fact, they’re doomed

You can think of these managers as examples of the current crop of fundamentalists who are appearing all over the world—including the world of business. These people are characterized, I believe, by two traits. First, they live according to a large body of superstitions. Second, they believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong. They believe that they have found the one and only truth, and they can’t abide changing old rules in light of new data.

Fundamentalists decide whether they like a new piece of information based on how it will affect their prior belief system, not based on whether it is actually true.

It’s much easier to effect change if you don’t have to overturn a superstition first. For example, nobody questioned the law of gravity, that’s because there wasn’t a competing theory of gravity (a superstition) built into the dominant social systems of the day. No one was threatened by gravity, so it was quickly accepted as fact. One of the reasons why email took off so fast was that it didn’t try to replace the phone or the mailman. It was a third thing, something new. But finding a place to grow where there isn’t already a prevailing superstition is hard. When I meet someone who’s willing to disregard an obvious truth just because it conflicts with his worldview,
I wonder about his judgment. I wonder what other truths he’s willing to ignore in order to preserve his superstitions.

When such a person is in charge, I do more than worry. I think that we’re obligated to start pointing out superstitions at work, in politics—anywhere we find them.
Superstitions are the final vestiges of pre-scientific mankind, and they make the workplace (and the world) a scary place.

The problem is that challenging someone’s faith (when it’s killing your organization) is a scary thing. Here’s the useful insight: When we know what to call this aversion to rational change, it’s much easier to deal with it In a meeting, we can say, “Are we superstitious about closing this plant and hiring people to do software instead? Or is there an actual analysis that will help us decide?” We can sit down with a coworker or a client and talk not about what we irrationally believe, but about the facts that suggest that we should try doing things a different way. My dream is that we’ll discover our obligation to spot the fundamentalists and call them on it. Regardless of the organization—nonprofit, factory work group, political party, it doesn’t matter—we now have no choice but to point out the difference between rational thought and pigeon-minded superstition.

Hindsight

FretDFire — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 19:26:00 GMT

It's useful to occasionally take a look inthe rear-view mirror. Note the below excerpt from Quentin Hardy in November 2002:

High tech is in deep trouble, and that owes to more than the economic downturn. The doldrums will end eventually, but for years to come tech vendors could be hampered by basic changes in how businesses spend $375 billion a year on technology and what they demand from it.

IT spending fell 11% in 2001, will decline 1% this year and may rise only 3% next year.

The 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management

FretDFire — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 16:32:00 GMT

I read The 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management, by David Thielen with Shirley Thielen (1999) on joining Microsoft in 1999. Much, but not all of it still rings true for me.

Dictating to qualified teams of motivated and focused employees can only decrease the productivity of the team. The best managers are the ones that do the least damage to the teams they have working for them <emphasis added>.

-p.21

HIRING SMART PEOPLE

…the key word here is smarts, not knowledge. People can acquire knowledge pretty easily (although don’t hire too far afield – a programmer will probably never become a doctor).

But smarts, that ability to turn on the brain and think, are much harder to find and virtually impossible to teach. Most people are born with a reasonable amount of smarts and a lot of curiosity – the two key elements. The trick is to find those who made it through the school systems without these critical elements being beaten out of them.

-p.25

For every hire keep in mind this critical corollary: the new hire should raise the mean of the team. If the team is all in the top 5 percent, then to raise the mean you are really trying to hire from the top 2.5 percent.

-p.32

FAIL QUICKLY

The key is to identify failure as quickly as possible. Sit down and try to come up with everything that could lead to failure. It’s often easy to accurately predict what can trip you up. The surprise is usually in which of the predicted items actually did cause the failure.

Then, for each item, figure out how to determine, as early as possible, if this is a showstopper. And if it is, then don’t give up. Find a way around the problem. Only if the problem is truly unsolvable do you kill the project.

-p.51

FAILURE MEANS SUCCESS

Fast failure is acceptable; slow failure is not. But even more unacceptable is no failure. If people never fail, then they are not trying hard enough. They are not pushing the envelope.

Failure means try something else. In most cases you can find another approach, another system, another solution that will work. Failing quickly usually means finding a successful alternative quickly, not closing down the project entirely.

Most projects that fail do not fail because there was no way to make them successful. They fail because they went down the wrong path and no one was willing to change direction once it became apparent that that path was destined for failure.

-p.52

DELIVER BAD NEWS IUMMEDIATELY

Problems need to be reported immediately. In fact, you should usually know that something may become a problem before it actually does. At the same time, you should be advised that a certain problem may exist, what is being done to research it, and when you will know if it is in fact a serious problem.

Further, just reporting the problem is not acceptable. A solution, or solutions, must be presented at the same time.

-p.55

PERFORMANCE, NOT EXCUSES

Let’s take a look at a sports team. Pro or city league, it doesn’t matter. Everyone understands the rules; you win or lose. If a player sprains an ankle, the team doesn’t get a couple of extra points. If a player is having a bad day, the other players generally aren’t terribly understanding.

Are the fans understanding of excuses? They don’t want to hear it. Maybe for a death in the family the player will be cut some slack for a game or two, but that seems to be about it. All that matters is winning.

…Microsoft attracts employees because it is success oriented. Both morale and performance are stellar due in part to this focus. People want to work with successful groups, and they are willing to accept that they are judged on their success alone as long as everyone else is too.

-p.77-79

RATING EMPLOYEES

On average, about 50 percent of an employee’s time is spent on things that the employee later discovers won’t work. So in order to succeed, you have to fail. And it is the end result that is measured by its success or failure. While the failures along the road to completion are by and large both accepted and ignored, the rating of the employee is based on what was accomplished.

…In other words, failure is a cause for negative rating. But it is also expected to occur for each employee and therefore does not have any long-term effect unless the employee continues to fail and fail and fail.

-p. 81

SHIP IT!

…Managers have to keep everyone on the project informed of direction and status. And for major changes in direction, they have to get buy-off from the employees. This is a critical component. People will not fight and die for imposed goals, but if they helped set the goals, then they will.

-p.87

SOME ELEMENS ARE MONOLITHICSome elements do need to be monolithic, even at Microsoft. All of the services such as mail, phones and IS are run by a central body. However, every one of these services could be handled by an outside contractor instead of internal employees and Microsoft would be the same company it is now.

-p.103

BILL WANTS TO KNOW

… it wasn’t that the people doing the actual work could talk to Bill. They were required to be there. He wasn’t going to do the review without the people present who could speak directly on the work being done. In practice, anyone doing a product review at Microsoft, right up to the CEO, talks directly to the person doing the work.

-p. 116

FREEDOM

This does not mean that you work in a vacuum. Key decisions need to be run by managers. The major design is presented to coworkers for review. On the marketing side there are committees whose approval must be obtained to run an ad. But even with this approval process, it is the job of the employee to come up with the approach and to obtain approval. And if an approach is not approved, then the employee must come up with another approach. Responsibility is never lifted from the employee.

-p.126

Personality Profile for the IT Pro - from TechRepublic 4.25.03

FretDFire — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 18:58:00 GMT

Does the below article snip from TechRepublic 4.25.03: http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6300-1060258.html ring true for your IT org?

Understanding cultural identity
It’s clear that for every major initiative you undertake that involves organizational change, your results will vary greatly depending on whether you understand the cultural identity of your department and address those issues first. So how do you do this? The answer comes in two stages: awareness and transformation.

First, it’s imperative to fully understand the IT staff members who make up your IT department. In his book, Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead the People who Deliver Technology, Paul Glen does a tremendous job of detailing the nature of IT personnel. They:

Are highly intellectual people who have been rewarded since a young age for individual achievements.
Value other persons of similar knowledge and can be intolerant of others not so.
Are attracted to this business solely by the technology and tend to work on technology for technology's sake, not necessarily for business’ sake.
Can tend to view data centers and networks as their own personal toy boxes and/or creations of their own artwork.
Are introverted by nature, choosing machines over humans and facing challenges in effective day-to-day formal and informal communications.
View the business world through what I call the Dilbert filter, which from a certain point of view is a sarcastic view of business, its objectives, drivers, and more importantly, the people who make up the business units.

Sin Taxes

FretDFire — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 18:54:00 GMT

The article below from Esquire-December 2002 by ANDREW CHAIKIVSKY presents an interesting alternative view on why people practice addictive behaviors, and how society deals with it.

You’ll quit Super Sizing the fries tomorrow. No you won’t. You’ll quit smoking when the tax per pack raises a dollar more next month. No you won’t. And because you believe it really is in your interest to do these things – but wont- you are a bit of a mystery to traditional economists.

Matthew Rabin wants to change all that-And then he wants to change your life with a few mathematical equations: Rabin, a thirty-eight-year-old economist at UC Berkeley who is widely regarded as one of the most powerful analytic and mathematics brains in the field, is a leader in the movement to introduce the irrational man to economics.

Take taxes. Rabin wants to refine the approach to sin taxes by accounting for what actually shapes people’s actions (and undermines most economic theory); things like weak self-control, immediate gratification, procrastination.

‘The point of higher taxes should not be to stop people from doing ‘sinful’ activities,” Rabin says. ‘The point should be to help keep people from engaging in behaviors that they themselves want to stop.”

Standard theory presumes that actors in a market are rational and always act in their own self interest. A high per-pack tax on cigarettes, for example, or just a clear awareness of the health effects of smoking may lead people to decide to stop. But they don’t. Rabin’s model quantifies their tendency not to act in their best interest.

His work attacks one of the worst blind spots in the standard model—the assumption that a person’s preferences are constant, or “time constant.” In simple terms, it presumes that if you desire to do something tomorrow, you will do that thing when tomorrow comes. And yet when tomorrow comes; it’s a new “today,” In fact, tomorrow never comes, Sound familiar? Many people act time inconsistently. Enter Rabin and others who are part of the growing school of behavioral economics which takes on the quirks of illogical human actions, tries to measure them through the empirical evidence found in psychology, and translates that data into revised economic formulas. This approach is no longer a mere outpost of economic theory; last year the American economic Association awarded Rabin the Clark medal as the best economist in America under forty.

As for sin taxes, Rabin thinks the traditional approach—simply raising the price of “sin” goods to get people to consume less of them—is least effective with people most likely to be its target, those who have self-control problems. Rabin’s Idea: take people’s time inconsistencies out of the equation altogether.

Faced with tile choice of quitting now or buying another pack, many smokers who want to quit will nonetheless choose buying cigarettes over suffering the pain of not smoking. They can always quit tomorrow. But, Rabin asks, what if the state cut the tax completely and instead sold “licenses” to smoke? The choice would be clarified. Fully rational people who wanted to continue smoking would buy the license (equal, say, to what a heavy smoker would otherwise pay in cigarette taxes for the year) and puff away. No harm. But those who wanted to stop smoking would lose the option of time inconsistency. They would face one big decision today, reducing or eliminating mistakes of self-control.

Sure, try to pass that law. But the underlying insight is reshaping economics. “Let’s stop ignoring the evidence,” Rabin says. “Let’s tweak the model. The math is the same. Let’s push our assumptions to be a little more realistic.”

Daniel C. Dennett – from BIG THINKERS

FretDFire — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 21:33:00 GMT

Daniel C. Dennett is one of my favorite thinkers. Her are some of his thoughts from the TV show BIG THINKERS that really spark some neurons:

Philosophy is what you do when you don’t know what the right questions are yet.

Once you’ve got the questions right, then you go answer them.

Right now, there are millions and millions, billions of little symbiont visitors inhabiting my body. They are in my hair, in my skin, in my gut and swimming though my bloodstream. “Oh help!” some people might think, “isn’t that awful?” But, of course, most of them are entirely benign, and some of them I couldn’t live without, and we’re a happy team.

What I am trying to do is to get people to think the same way about their brains. There is nothing but mindless neurons in there. The factory is empty –there is no ‘Big Boss’ in there at all. It is an unsettling thought – but you can get used to it. And once you do, you realize that’s what you are. It doesn’t mean that you don’t exist. It just means that’s what you are made of.

Before Darwin, I think it just stood to reason, for just about everybody, that it takes a great big, magnificent, wonderful, intelligent thing to make a lesser thing. You never see a pot making a potter. You never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith. It’s always big, fancy, smart things making stupid things.

Darwin turned that upside down. Now you could have an absolutely mindless, ignorant, mechanical process which generates minds.

Then we begin to see that the sorts of things that minds do – designing things, creating things, inventing things – could be done by matter.

An algorithm is a procedure that requires no intelligence. It’s just a mechanical procedure. And that’s what our minds are made of – lots of little bits doing very rigid, ungraceful, inflexible things – but, when you put them together in enough numbers and enough ways, the result you get is that wonderful, lifelike, mental world that we exhibit to ourselves and others.

Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots.

The idea that you can somehow boil a mind-a spirit -down to brain activity is deeply repugnant to many people. People want their minds to be ‘beyond all measure’. The idea that their minds are boringly finite is not attractive. An so, people want to believe that there is more and more and more and more in their mind than any science can ever tell you.

One of my favorite artifacts is the British Seagull outboard motor, which is dead simple. Their motto is “what isn’t there can’t break”. Much the same could be said about consciousness, what isn’t there doesn’t have to be explained.

The basic appeal of robotics is: we understand a process when we can make a model of it. So the idea of a robot is – let’s see if we really understand what intelligence is, what thinking is, what perception is, and let’s use an alien a medium as possible – let’s make it out of silicon and aluminum and glass, instead of out of proteins. We’ll learn a lot about what the actual function of all those proteins is by seeing if we can mimic that function in other materials.

Consider the question of whether roboticists could make a small robotic bird that could fly around the room, land on a twig, and catch insects on the fly. Incredibly difficult. Not because there is anything magical or mysterious about the bird doing that, it’s just so complicated. So, what you do instead, is you break the problem down into parts, and you do the parts. You can make an airplane. You don’t try to make a swallow. The same thing is true of trying to make a humanoid robot. You break human intelligence down into parts. You make a system that can do this, maybe make a system that can answer questions, or play chess, or do a hundred other things. And you learn a little bit about how we do it.

Why should we be good? The traditional answer is because God tells us to be good and God created us. Not an entirely satisfactory answer for, I think, most people. For many people it is. Well, if we are naturalists, if we think that we are a biological species that has evolved on this planet according to the laws of nature, then, at first it seems that there’s just not going to be an answer to this question. There couldn’t be. I think that’s wrong. I think that one can see how we have evolved a perspective on ethical thinking. Many people worry that a materialistic understanding of the mind of this sort leads to moral nihilism of some sort. I don’t believe that for a minute. It leads to a re-founding of morality and ethics on a naturalistic basis. One has to understand how we as a species have evolved to a point where we have culture, where we then create ethical systems which we negotiate and re-evaluate and achieve something like an equilibrium of agreement on how to live and why.

Would it be dangerous for the people of Great Britain to start driving on the right tomorrow? Yes, it would be carnage unless it was very carefully planned, the way the Swedes did. Not so many years ago they switched, in a single weekend, from driving on the left to driving on the right.

When Darwin came along he proposed an inversion of the standard way of thinking that was much more dramatic than switching from driving on the left to driving on the right, and he didn’t have Swedish beurocrats to plan the move. The world was hit with Darwin unprepared.

Recently the Pope has declared that evolution is a fact, but then he then says “except for the human soul.” You can’t get by Darwinian means to the human soul.

The way many non-religious people say it is “Well, I can see how Darwinian process can explain the evolution of design in the natural world, but I don’t see how it can explain the creativity of a Shakespeare, or the insight of an Einstein. I don’t see how it can explain the wondrous working of the mind”

Well, part of me wants to say “What amazing hubris. You say that algorithmic processes can explain a nightingale, but not an ode to a nightingale. You think an ode to a nightingale, a poem, is that much more wonderful than a real nightingale? You don’t know enough about nightingales. If algorithmic processes can account for all the brilliant design that goes into making an actual nightingale – I think it can handle a poem too.”