I see from the news that California may issue registered warrants or what as a work around for not having the cash to pay their bills.  The newspaper men are calling IOUs, but it’s always hard to tell when a piec.e of paper transitions between stock, bond, currency, warrant, IOU, etc. Are these insturments better or worse than California’s bonds?

This reminded me of a story from the depression where.  In that story the local merchants arranged to convert the town issued tax warrants into their local micro-currency.  You can read that story in this posting, it’s the second story in the piece.

I enjoyed Lera  Boroditsky’s  essay in support of  the Whorfian hypothesis. Denialist like to mention grapple.  It’s is a kind of snow.  Slightly melted and refrozen.  So, see, English has lots of words for snow too. But I long ago picked a side in that argument: Language deeply effects your thinking.  So for me her wonderful essay is preaching to the choir.

It’s a great read, with lots of really fun stories.  There is a tribe which describes location via compass points.  “There is a spot on your shirt’s southwest collar.”    If you ask them to order a series of images in timeline order they orient them east to west; much as speakers of Mandarin speakers will order then vertically.    Bridges have male gender in Spanish, and female in German.  Asking and answering in English a people who’s native tongue is respectively Spanish or German will describe a bridge as – respectively:  big, strong, sturdy, towering v.s. beautiful, elegant, slender.

Some languages, like English, aren’t really into gender, while others have lots.  I can’t find anything to confirm this, but she reports that in some  Australian  Aboriginal languages have a gender used for shiny things.  Which is notable given where I presume they got the name for Google Wave.

Of course, what  Tim O’Reilly was trying to do when he gin’d up the term Web 2.0, the millionth word, was to shape the conversation.  He may have set his sights too low.

I have long been a huge fan of  Robert Cialdini’s first book, Influence.  The original printing is the best because it retains the maximal emotion.  He was horrified to discover that people had these clever tricks for manipulating his behavior.  The book is written as a kind of handbook for how to defend your self.  Later editions, and his later books, are colored by a more even handed attitude, and sometimes you think he’s gone entirely over to the darkside.  I’m suspicious the makes a good living giving talks to salemen.

I’ve not read the most recent book  Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive but there is a nice short summary of all 50 techniques to be found here.

Reading those I was struck by one entry:

As time goes by, the value of a favor increases in the eyes of the favor-giver, and decreases in the eyes of the favor-receiver. Researchers asked a group of people in the random office environment to exchange favors and then rate the value of the given/received favor in their eyes. A few weeks later the same employees were reminded of the favor, and asked to evaluate the favor again. Favor-givers consistently assigned higher value to a given favor, while as the time passed by, favor-receivers tended to assign lower value to the received favor.

Ha!  That’s amusing, but the reason why it’s amusing should be drawn out.  It’s amusing because the entire statement is an oxymoron, a farce in one line.  Such misunderstandings are always amusing.  It’s a category error.  Favors are gifts, they are not economic transactions.  When you do a favor your are not collect IOUs in the currency of some pseudo economy.  If you think you are, well then your not doing actually favor, your playing a game.  Keeping score.  And there is nothing wrong with playing a games, lots of games in this life.  Certainly lots of activities labeled as gift exchanges are in fact just point scoring in some game or another.  But if you think your playing such a game you presuming that the recipient knows the rules of your imaginary game fraught with affordances for misunderstandings.  And, that is the stuff of farce.

It helps to recognize that it is in the nature of public goods that the books do not balance.  To push them into that frame is to miss the point.  Recently I’ve come to saying to people who are suffering from this category error: “Those books don’t balance, nor should the, but if we must think in those terms how do you want the accounts to look when you arrive at your deathbed?”

Persuasion  is often the art of moving the decision into an advantageous frame.

Years ago I worked for a company that had no quality assurance, none!  No testing, nothing!  In point of fact they didn’t have a lot of things, furniture for example.  We had some folding tables and chairs, but not enough.  Performing without a net, wee!  That may have been the first time I mumbled “Look Ma!  No hands!”  We took a childish glee in our bravado.  I was talking to my inner mom.  I she smiled lovingly and quietly suggested: you be careful honey.

I’m always amused when I mumble that.  I’m the audience at my own farce. Self-awareness is better if amused.  I’ve worked on projects without: customer contact, product management, specifications, management, real engineers, sales, money, office, email, operations, user documentation, source control, a good editor, a sane language, clue, I could go on.  And, I must point out that these days, what with cloud computers, there is a fad for computer projects without computers!

In fact this pattern is so common that I’m starting to think there’s something to it.  We presume it’s a bug, but maybe it is a feature. In any case, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of being on the look out for it.

Each time there is a narrative.  There is always a list of awful things that happen if you add it back: lazy OPS, whinny QA, micro-managers.  There is a whole  literature  that lays the blame for institutional  inability  to innovate down to their fine offices and the heavy sauces in their company  cafeteria.    There is always a bit (or more) of a sense of mission in doing without.  This isn’t just hair shirt; it’s a real pleasure showing that you can rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time.  All while riding a bicycle with no hands!  These all create a kind of pride and solidarity in the team, along with a bit of a dirty secret.  In a sense all that narrative is an amazingly positive way to make good out of scarcity.

Do-without no-hands seem to be a positive.  And not just because you get a better story to tell to your grand kids.  Doing without can be a total win.  Lousy is often a damn sight more expensive than none for a lot of the parts of projects.  Money is always short.  Thrift is a virtue, it buys time.

The only time it blows up in your face is when the team becomes so deeply committed to positive aspects of forgoing this or that, and then suddenly what they desperately need is that.  One firm of my experience had lousy QA and it all blew up.  It took two expensive tries to fix that.  First they hired up some QA, but they got no respect and it failed.  They took the most senior of labor and stuck him with the job.  Their status, and their intimate familiarity with the local custom, let them route around the deeply entrenched belief that we could ride that bicycle with nothing but dancer like body language.