Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

We got a another harvest off our bag of wet straw. This time I made oyster mushroom risotto; with a bit of sherry and a bit of cream. It was just wonderful! Blame Brian Kane for that idea.

I’m at ApacheCon.

A very attractive woman just ran up to me and told me my lap top is extremely cute!

You wish you were here!

Phil Greenspun wrote a satirical posting on why it’s ok not to care about other people troubles. His self amused argument is that in the Modern world such work can be left to specialists.

Modern, aka Urban, life is all about residing in numerous communities. If you buy into my two part model of communities (That they stand on three legs and generally have a limited liablity for their extent.) Then Phil’s strawman can be reframed as one’s duty to other members of a community is limited to that which is within the liablity scope of that particular community.

Phil’s posting is amusing because of it’s exagerated nature. Few communities are very formality about their limited liablity contract. In fact it may well be a sign of a scam in progress when a community becomes exacting about it.

Why exactly am I expected to be sympathetic to a coworker who’s not feeling well? Is that work part of the community social contract of the workplace? Possibly not, more likely it’s part of the social contract of some larger community we both inhabit.

Sometime ago a friend of mine suffered a horrible event. It laid waste to a major aspect of their life. Discussing it, a long after the fact one aspect of the story struck me. People in other spheres of this person’s life had no idea.

It was just like the sailor with two wives, two families, in two ports recieving word of the distruction of his other home. People would have idea what to make of his mood. If he told them their first reaction would be “Gee! I never knew you had another life.” In part their reaction included an element of “Oh, I thought your loyalities lay elsewhere.”

Modern life’s advantage is that it provides a diversified portfolio. Diversifited portofolios only work well if your willing to dump parts of the portfolio.

To the untravelled, territory other than their own familiar heath is invariably fascinating. Next to love, it is the one thing which solaces and delights. Things new are too important to be neglected, and mind, which is a mere reflection of sensory impressions, succumbs to the flood of objects. Thus lovers are forgotten, sorrows laid aside, death hidden from view. There is a world of accumulated feeling back of the trite dramatic expression–”I am going away.” - Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie

I like that my first day with the current employer was Halloween of 1999; and my last day in the office will be Friday the 13th. Four years, shorter than my usual time per employer; I’m such a homebody!

Now the recreation of looking for a new gig; suggestions welcome. I’m particularly interested in working on systems that help small entities leverage the internet - in quantity. email: bhyde at pobox . com

The library’s copy of Paradox of Choice has gotten around to me. I’m bummed that I didn’t learn very much. I guess, I know too much about modern marketing. Good news, there is one very amusing item, a joke, about half way through.

But first, a story. In the 1950s Herb Simon at CMU passed an insight from one side of campus to the other.

He was working on Artificial Intelligence, building computer programs to play games. If you write such programs you quickly discover that your human opponents wander off before your software has time to pick the best move. To keep them engaged you’d better make some compromises.

Simon passed this insight to the folks over the business school.  Their the insight evolved into the idea that economic entities (firms, business men) rarely, if ever, seek the best outcome.   Instead economic actors make trade-offs just like the AI programs. They seek satisfactory outcomes rather than the best outcomes.

At it’s core the Paradox of Choice is joke.  The world is made up of those two kinds of people: the maximizers and the satisfiers. Maximizers spend more resources on getting the best possible outcome and satisfiers don’t. The joke is on the Maximizers. They do tend to archive their goal, accumulating more than the satisfiers, but ironically they are never satisfied. Depression is highly correlated with maximizing behavior.

This is the books’ key insight - you can make somebody miserable by converting them into a Maximizer.

You do this by presenting them with more choices. That encourages a switch in their behavior from happy satisfier to depressed maximizer. It’s a denial of service attack on the problem solving mechanism.

Remember: “marketing is war” and “planning is what you do to avoid action.”