Monthly Archives: October 2006

Missing the Train

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I spent a huge slice of my life writing toolkits for graphical user interfaces. The primary tension in that work is between supply and demand; the software engineering knowledge available and the interfaces you wish to build.

Strong opinions on both sides. Engineering loyalists prefer more objects in the design. Have a chart? Give every point on a chart it’s own object. Customer loyalists wanted it implemented quickly (more objects can help there) and very very fast (more objects are no help there). A more difficult tension from the customer side the desire for pretty, easy, and powerful.

Both camps have factions within; the most striking one is between professionals and practitioners, e.g. those who study the problem and those who build commercial systems to actually solve the problem. Few commercial system builders are aware of the work done in labs on constraint based UI tool kits. Intellidraw was a shining exception. Few people working in the labs have a clue about the elegant architecture of the Apple Newton’s UI toolkit.

I haven’t working in this domain much for more than a decade now. I moved on. The UI toolkit design space seemed to be largely mined out. Worse, powerful network effects had locked in solutions patterns.

I moved onto the open source puzzle, i.e. how to leverage the infinite pool of talent on the other side of the internet. A much richer vein of opportunities to mine. Still is!

Has the academic UI community come to this new party? The answer appears to be no and that is so weird!

I don’t see these applications through the old paradigm. Model on one side and user on the other and the designer’s job is to fill the gap with view & controller. Meanwhile the researcher stands off to one side attempting to make the interaction more … whatever, more efficient, more fun, more smooth.

These days I see an artifact on one side and a group on the other. The artifact plays a key role in the group dynamics; as a point of rendezvous, the manifestation of it’s common cause. View/control is no longer a particularly useful way of thinking about that problem. I have other ways I now think of it: coordination, community rituals, games, limited warfare, etc, etc.

While there are numerous practitioners of this new craft with thousands of examples of wonderful systems already built (source control, wikis, forums, bug trackers, IM systems, etc.). So where, damn it, are is the professional faction? This train left the station a while ago; and with a few very specialized examples it looks like they missed the train entirely.

Darwin and Platform Tyranny

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“Tyranny consists of the desire of universal power beyond its scope.”

One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can spit out those damn brainstorms before they do too much damage to your equilibrium or worse or are extinguished by your daily life.

I’d not noted before that the evolved animal is like a software platform.

One of the curious facts about software platforms is that they aren’t good for anything. You have to pile an application on to the platform before it solves real problem. That is a useful right first approximation. Of course platforms are good for something, they are good for solving some space of problems. They allow you to build things.

There is a gap between a platform and a problem solution. In platform system design, where we don’t solve problems we just design more platforms, we think of these as layers.

For example the end-to-end principle suggests that the layers should be thin, so that the lower layers are windowed down to a kernel of necessary function and no more. In business theory where platforms go by other names like toolkits, standards, rule sets, and are observed in numerous guises such as major commodities on supply chain, we know that a platform creates an options space of further commercial activity. There is always a lot of competitive to and fro about who gets to capture that value. Suppliers often covet value created down stream from them in the supply chain. That’s no different than how platform vendors often fold high value innovations back into their platform offering. A move that is contrary to the end-to-end principle but is quite rational in a commercial mindset. When we complain about a supplier, say Microsoft, overreaching, say by bundling the web browser with the operating system, we call that monopoly; but as the quote above suggests it’s a kind of tyranny.

Reading and thinking about “Breakdown of Will” has been triggering some very surprising connections to all that. Animals are wired to manage their attention in a way that is at odds what we believe to be the optimal way to manage the attention of a rational man. There is a gap between the platform, i.e. the animal, and the problem to be solved, i.e. to be a rational man. It is into this gap that we humans pour our clever rationalizing schemes. Applications on the platform.

So that was my brainstorm. What triggered it was some stuff at the beginning of a book from the anthropology library about trying to explain religion. The introduction was working it’s way through the necessary dross and was talking about Darwinian explanations for religion. My reaction was “The platform can only tell you so much about the applications that run on it.” Darwinian ideas are a major supplier in the explaination of animal systems, but there is a tendency for people to let these ideas overreach their natural scope. You see a similar overreaching by the ideas that come of economics. At this point in my thinking about the ideas in “Breakdown of Will” I’m more inclined to put religion in the application layer as part of our struggle to create useful solutions atop the worse is better legacy platform.

Self Binding

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In Arizona you can relinquish your right to go into Casinos by signing an agreement after which the Casino operator can toss you off the premises. That’s presumably a sign that you don’t trust your self to avoid the temptation. In California there is a town where you can relinquish your right to drive your car at night. I guess that’s a sign that you don’t trust your teenagers? Maybe it’s a sign that your really are paranoid about thieves. Or maybe it’s a scheme to keep mom from sneaking out the craft supply store. When you buy real estate in a gated community you sign away a vast range of freedoms, as you do when you move into a carefully zoned neighborhood. Of course there is the movement to have young people sign pledges that they will behave in a particular ways ranging from behave in class, through do their homework, up through abstain from sex until marriage.

All these are strategies to control the behavior of the parties involved. We all know that short term pleasures do tend to displace long term benefits. These schemes are necessary because we don’t trust our neighbors, our children and most interestingly ourselves! Optimal impulse control is extremely hard.

We all make “personal rules” that mimic the systems above because we don’t trust our future selves. This lack of trust is based on experience; in what makes for a variation of catch 22, if we had kept to our personal rules in the past we wouldn’t need them.

Mark Twain decided to limit his smoking to one cigar a day, for his health, and found that over time his cigars grew larger until the rule lead to the added benefit that he could use his cigar as a cane should the need arise. One of W.C. Fields characters, a temperance lecture would explain that he keep a bottle of liquor at close at hand. For snake bits only! He also kept close at hand a snake.

Here’s the Problem

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Ben Franklin changes his mind:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider’d, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I din’d upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

The mind is not a particularly consistent thing. I like that: “a reasonable creature” because it is a more modern framing of this puzzle than the classic, i.e. Greek, where in the the rational man does battle with his animal self, typically thru the medium of will power. Franklin is more modern, he reasons cheerfully amoungst his multiple interests.

I gather we can now be quite exacting about what’s going on when we change our minds. Below we have two ways that we might weight the value of future rewards. The upper curve is that prescribed by the rational man beloved econ 101 text books. The lower curve is the result of experiments on pigeons, children, and undergraduates.

Causes of Concern

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It is a very strange and disturbing time, isn’t it?

Here in Massachusetts we have a Republican running for governor who’s campaign is largely funded by her spouse. They live in this amazingly wealthy neighborhood in a house on the ocean north of Boston. His company is a few miles from the house, making for a pleasant commute. Which is all fine; but for the detail that the state’s economic development program helped pay for the villa his company’s in. Seems that the Republican administrators of the program decided that this delightful neighborhood, one of the richest in the state and possibly the country, was a economically depressed. Well I guess that’s what business friendly Republicans do.

And then we have this guy Allen in Virginia, running for Senate. He stuffed deer’s heads into the the mailboxes of black people, or niggers as he called them for years. After months of stories like that coming out about this guy he’s running neck and neck against his opponent. What’s up with people in Virginia?

I have often joked, but now I am afraid, that what globalization would bring to us was South American governance, i.e. where when countries go bad people of the opposition just disappear never to be seen again. The right to demand that a court review the why somebody has been tossed in prison, it’s what 400, 600 years old? Our elected officials, here in the US, recently set that aside. The president or his minions now have the power to disappear us.

Consider this story in the Times today. Guy happens on the vice president in the street. Tells him that he thinks the Iraq policy is reprehensible. Can you guess what happens next? Yup, the secret service tossed him in jail.

Why exactly do we fear terrorist more than this? Why do we fear terrorist more than people who would, apparently without shame, write laws that retroactively say that their torturing people is legal. Why do we fear terrorists more than people who would make torture legal?

And then you have the announcement that Rice, who’s now secretary of state, was fully briefed on the Al Queda threat in July 2001, months before 9/11. She was told on a scale of 1-10 this threat was a 10, that something had to be done. She did nothing. Which is news. It’s deeply troubling. But it’s part of a pattern that was already clear. The administration just didn’t care. Didn’t care to learn how care about this kind of issue.

So while that’s horrible I’m more bewildered that it appears the 9/11 commission knew about that briefing and left it out of their report. Huh? I know that the commissions report was horribly partisan, but really this is over the top. How exactly can we trust anything in the report at this point. What else got left on the cutting room floor?

Of course Rice handled the news like any bad PR problem. First pretended that meeting didn’t happen, then that she couldn’t remember it, and then finally her staff admitted it did happen. Hope thru out, I presume, that it might blow over.

II guess it did blow over.
Now we have a new circus. A congressman who’s been chasing underage boys around the capital building for years. The good news, for him, is that the Scientologists are old friends of his, so he’s hiding in one of their ‘rehab centers.’ He’s got some excuses. Blame those Catholic priests. Though people say he doesn’t drink he’s also blamed on the drink. You’d think given that he’s got millions of bucks he could get a better crisis manager to handle his PR.

Of course the real story there is that if you’re a viciously unethical political party boss, then a rich closet gay pedophile makes a great lieutenant. No risk he’s not going to follow orders! So now we have the small amusement of watching the party captains skitter like roaches under the fridge when the lights come on.

What’s wrong with this country? It still it isn’t clear that the Republicans will be shown the door in the upcoming election. How can any citizen vote for any of these people? This really bewilders me. More so, it terrifies me.

Control of Appetite

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i’m enjoying reading “Breakdown of Will” by Ainslie. One name his work goes by is pico-economics. If that name is not intended to be sarcastic then it’s at least ironic given that Economics is currently king of the social sciences and Ainslie’s model underminds the king’s legitamacy. The market stalls of pico economics are set out inside your head. The market participants negotate for your attention, slices of your time. I recorded a bit of audio from the market floor in an old blog posting.

Re-negotiate your cable contract once a year. Oh, and your long distance service. Rebalance your investments annually. Keep an eye on your mortgage rate and refinance at appropriate times, but not too often. Consider having a health savings account. Clip coupons. Keep track of those rebates. Join frequent flyer programs as appropriate. Be sure you have a will. Check that your love ones know your end of life desires. Eat more vegetables. Take regular breaks to avoid typing injuries. Get plenty of sleep.

Here, let me quote a fragment from the book:

I have described a model of learned interests that compete freely on the basis of timeframes over which of their rewards will be prefered. … a person is a population of these roommates each clamoring for control of the room … to continue to exist each interest must be the highest bidder at some time or it will be extinquished …

But pico-economics is not like classical economics. Not at all! The math that governs in the attention marketplace of your head is taken straight out of bizzaro world. It might as well be non-linear. We don’t respect the future; even if you think you do. You don’t.

At the heart of this bizzaro math is deeply hardwired preference for immediate gratification over longer term goals. This evil math is time scale free so we will scratch an itch in preference to eating some ice cream, and eat ice cream that’s at hand in preference to a fine meal with friends in half hour, and that we will go off to long lunch rather than finish that deliverable the team needs to make progress next month, etc. etc.

The preference for short term ones v.s. long term is so pervasive that we tend to gloss over how odd it is. Would you like to stop what your doing and have some ice cream? How do you decide that turning your attention to the fun of a bowl of ice cream is worth it? The utilitarian answer is that you weigh the alternative and if it’s better than what your doing then you switch. What’s curious about living in the bizzaro world of pico-economics is that this calculation is radically different depending on how close at hand that ice cream is. Going out to get it? Going into the kitchen? Plucking it off the desert cart? Dipping your spoon the bowl? Each step closer and in the competition for your attention the ice cream becomes vastly more likely to seize control of your scarce attention. So much so that it makes no economic sense at all.

From animal experiments they know exactly how out of wack your internal calculator is. If the pleasure of ice cream is 2, 20, or 200 seconds away for the spoon, the desert cart, and the kitchen respectively then you will treat see the fun of ice cream as 66 units, 8, or 1 unit respectively. If we replaced ice cream with a financial reward this implies that people have to struggle to avoid accepting a dime in two seconds v.s. $6.60 in few minutes later. Rationally this makes no sense; since I could make a mint moving ice cream closer to my customers.

That our attention is so badly behaved creates a problem what we struggle with continually. For example we all know not to buy the ice cream and bring it home; i.e. to avoid the temptation. Ainslie reports a delightful experiment involving pigions. Pigeons have the same bizzaro internal marketplace. So if you put them in a cage and give them some buttons to peck you can show that they will peck a button that gives smaller rewards sooner over a button that delivers significantly larger rewards later. Amazingly this setup annoys the pigion. He knows that he is making bad choices. Apparently there is a rational market regulating pigion in there scolding the his irrational free market animal pigion. How do we know? Well they can augement the experiment to add a third button pecking that will disabled the short term reward button. The pigeon will use that third button to lock in his commitment to the longer term reward.

Avoiding temptation and using external devices to make binding commitments are both means to force your internal bizzaro attention economy to behave better. We don’t trust ourselves anymore than we trust other parties. We engage in lots of these strategic games in an attempt to keep the bizzaro internal economy from doing more harm. Most of these work by reducing our options. We lock in our savings in long term investments, we don’t buy the ice cream, and the pigeon pecks that third button.