Defaults matter

Great post at Web Social Architecture called How Twitter promotes quantity to the detriment of quality and why Twitter matters nonetheless.

The meat of the post:

Why do people on Twitter care how many people are following them?

The answer is, because Twitter wants it that way. The affordance for social capital on Twitter is all about quantity: How many following, how many followers, and how many updates posted. The measure of a person, in Twitter, is all about the total amounts accumulated:
[...]
The display of these measures represents just a fraction of the text on a Twitter page, just a few pixels of space—but they’re critical, because they are the attributes attached to the representation of my identity. Effectively, they are me, and I am valued on the basis of their accumulation. Other people, at a glance, get a sense of who I am that’s based on the amount of stuff I have, and not what kind of stuff, and not on the value of that stuff.

This is a bad thing. As Twitter’s massive increase in number of users the last few months has started to illustrate, an increase in users also increases the breadth of topics, decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Six months ago, when Twitter was populated mainly by a relatively narrow group of social software and Web aficionados, there was a stronger sense of Twitter being a community. Today there’s much less topical focus, and Twitter’s limitations as a social tool have become much more readily apparent.

The fix: Build quality-based social capital.

What if, instead of showing, underneath my photo and name, the number of people I follow, the number of people following me, and the number of times I’ve posted, Twitter showed data that reflected the value of my activity? For example, what if my Twitter identity were associated with the percentage of my posts replied to, favorited, and re-tweeted by others?

Deeply insightful. I continually am surprised at how UI is the red-headed stepchild of product development, when it is the the thing that most influences a user's experience.

Ways to improve seasteading - attract the Amish

The Seasteading Institute recently published a survey asking people what would be the best use of their time.

There are a bunch of different engineering activities are proposed which range from full scale floating hotels to just basic R&D - hoping that people in the future will be able to make good use of the knowledge generated.

It strikes me that the big problem that they are skirting, and that has yet to be adequately solved is one of the most basic - food and fresh water. Both strike me as extremely difficult to get on the open ocean.

Solve those two problems, and essentially the whole problem is solved. That isn't to say that most people would want to live on a floating platform out at sea with no power generation and only a low variety food supply. The point is that such a platform would pass the "Amish threshold". With the right building blocks, one could build a culture (or appropriate one) that gets lots of people out on the sea.

Without a lot of people seasteading, there just isn't much hope of anything practical happening - such as incremental improvement to the point where ordinary people would consider trying out life on a floating platform.

Sorry for what again?

Henry at Crooked Timber write: Friends Don’t Let Friends Publish in Elsevier Journals

The post starts out antagonistic and continues on from there:

Most obviously, we shouldn’t publish in Elsevier journals. This is easy for me to say – I am in a field where Elsevier isn’t especially strong – but I hope that I would say it if I were in a field where Elsevier journals dominated. In general, I would prefer my own work not to be used to add cover and credibility to manifestly bogus and unethical publication strategies. Furthermore, I don’t think we should review for Elsevier journals either...

Some of the comments are even better.

As usual, The Last Psychiatrist says all that needs to be said:

I have a question: is anyone accusing Merck of faking the data? Are the studies all lies? No. This journal contained research previously published (and I assume therefore peer reviewed) elsewhere, and review articles. I'll grant that the review articles are hardly cutting edge, but no one can say they are false or incorrect. Isn't it possible that Merck might have something useful to say on the subject of bone loss?

So, what is all the fuss about, again? Control. Intellectuals simply don't want anyone moving in on their advice giving turf, the heart of their power. Whether the people 'tainted' by business are right or not is not at issue - not even part of the discussion.

Introducing Bias

Hat tip: MetaCool

Elizabeth Gilbert has a great Ted Talk which basically suggests that there is a benefit to being irrational - to believing in spirits and such. This is particularly interesting because this talk was given at TED - one of the most SWPL-ly events next to Burning Man. While there always has been a large "spiritual but not religious" fringe withing the SWPL tribe, I've never seen it accorded this much respect. For her sake, I hope they didn't put Dawkins up next - peoples' heads might have exploded from the cognitive dissonance.

Prediction: Gun Bubble

I've been seeing the signs that the gun bubble is starting to crest. I want to start making predictions so as to hone my intuition, the gun bubble will be my first.

I predict: within 4 months, the gun bubble will crest. 6 months after that, ammo availability at Walmart will be generally good (it will be unusual to find bulk .22, 9mm .40 and .45 out of stock), prices will either have stabilized at roughly September 2007 levels or will be noticeably dropping.

I'll be the first to admit that these numbers are pretty broad, but frankly, this is my first public prediction - I'm hedging my bets a bit.

A bit about Body Language

Hat Tip: Ben Casnocha

What We Say Without Words

A short introduction to reading peoples' body language. It looks like the author, Joe Navarro has a few books out about body language.

Engineering: Art vs Science

Hat Tip: NPost

Wired has an article about how Google's culture drove out a relatively famous designer because their culture is too engineering focused.

It strikes me that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an engineer at all. There has been and probably always will be a divide between problem domains that are best solved by intuition and those that are best solved by logic. As peoples' understanding of problems increases, the divide shifts, usually increasing the area covered by logic. One of the most famous, recent examples of this is the revolution in baseball chronicled by the book Moneyball wherein a deep understanding of the game combined with the use of advanced statistics has largely replaced talent scouts (some teams are strongly resisting this change with varying degrees of success).

This divide shows up everywhere - and in most places, intuition is used to deal with higher levels of abstraction and logic is used to deal with the lower levels. Almost all of science is dominated by logic, but there is no logic based way to generate a theory - that is mostly in the domain of intuition.

There is one area where the relationship is inverted, however - design itself. In design, or other "creative disciplines", it is difficult to analyze parts of a work - generally works stand or fall as wholes - integration and overall style being more important than individual details. Additionally, focus groups and customers are notoriously bad at understanding their own desires. However, almost everyone can easily rank order products or works or art by their attractiveness or willingness to purchase. This higher level evaluation is where statistics and logic come into play, not in the lower levels, debating line thickness by a few pixel widths. Much like in other areas, though, as science advances, the line at which things can be analyzed moves - shrinking the areas in which art holds sway and enlarging the realm of science.