You can just wander into the middle of a week-long argument in which two to four participants are quarreling, at that interesting register of polite people debating firmly-held beliefs energetically, about Marx, Žižek, and the efficacy of Lacanian psychoanalysis in enacting the revolutionary program.
Tumblr’s robust support for animated GIFs is a critical competitive advantage, and its privacy controls are “worse” than Facebook’s, but make its users much happier.
I am nothing remotely resembling an early observer of Tumblr. I know it through things like the Tragedy Series and industry-specific reaction gif blogs. It’s fascinating, though, to have the sudden realization of “wow, this is kinda big.” A particular interest for me is the way Tumblr enables fandom and the particular brand of subversive-here, disappointingly-banal-there, remix culture that fandom loves. There are infinite Homestuck fanblogs, there are animated gifs from virtually all the good TV of the past decade, and there are enough Texts From Last Night mash-ups to choke a horse. It reminds me very strongly of LiveJournal in LJ’s own days in the sun, going from being this weird little thing that was very personal and fandom-oriented to suddenly being Big. I have no idea where things are going, but considering how deeply vile Facebook is and how deeply determined Dick Costolo to make Twitter suck, I have to hope that Tumblr makes both of them eat dirt.
]]>The problem here is a toxic incentive structure, just like the reason the TSA reduces security. The various political folk who are inveighing against Craigslist have no idea what they’re talking about and are going to make Craigslist less useful for everyone and cost their taxpayers a lot of money in the process - and yet, for them personally, there is no downside to attacking Craigslist. Attacking Craigslist makes them look “tough on crime,” look like vigorous, active advocates of the public good, and look like paragons of conventional morality.
The most effective things you can do to increase airline security and reduce sex trafficking are the most boring ones, and the current structure of incentives all but guarantees that those measures will not be taken, and instead countermeasures will be taken that will make the problem worse. This underscores again the importance of narrative. Software providers and other technical people are in danger because of these toxic incentives - people who don’t know how your business works could have an incentive to mess with you, and are quite likely to be immune to consequences in the practical sense. This is why we developers and sysadmins need to be aware of the social, political, and cultural context of our professional actions - the less aware we are, the more likely that we’ll find ourselves out of a job, at the helm of a foundering company, or forced to implement asinine requirements because of forces beyond our control.
]]>Consider one experiment, of which Wiseman writes:
I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2 inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
We are all human, and our brains all operate in similar ways. One of the things that our brains spend a lot of time doing is deciding what’s important and what’s not before we ever consciously think about it. That’s good, because you’d rather not spend much time thinking about how to breathe, walk, or eat. But since so many unconscious decisions are going on, your brain sometimes dismisses important things. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the opposite, where your brain makes a big deal out of something unimportant. The good news is that you can train your unconscious mind to be better at noticing the things that matter to you.
Wiseman’s research ties into one of my favorite books: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell spends a lot of time going through different ways that our unconscious mind can, with training, with proper care and feeding, produce miraculous results. He and Wiseman also show how badly we can go astray when we abandon responsibility for what we feed our brains.
I’d like to note one important implication this has for IT folks, both for sysadmins and for front-line support people. A computer professional thinks differently from the people who rely on them. That’s good, because you need someone who thinks in the same framework that the creators of computer hardware and software do. However, that can’t be the only thing that an IT person knows how to do. An IT person must be a translator: they must help messages get from the creators of software to the users. This is like being a lucky person around unlucky people: because you are thinking differently, you will see different opportunities, you will take different paths, and it may be a little frustrating that the “unlucky” users don’t seem to follow your logic and don’t understand your advice. Be patient. In both cases, the skills can be learned.
Learning how to communicate with users takes years. Learning how to be lucky is also time-consuming, but Wiseman provides us with some more compact advice.
Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. […] Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety. […] Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse.
None of these things are inherent to a person: you can learn to change your mind, and you should. Do these things work? Wiseman claims that they do:
]]>I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.