Monthly Archives: May 2008

Some thoughts about credibility

Credibility is one of the most fundamental aspects of how we deal with people. It may not have anything to do with how much we like a person, or how much we trust them with other aspects of friendship. Someone’s credibility is concerned with how much stock you can place in someone’s statements.In science, I deal with this all of the time. Just because someone has a degree does not make them credible.Indeed, there are plenty of people with a degree in a field who are not a reliable source of information about that particular field, much less other aspects of life. Case in point: you can find an MD to endorse anything.

So – how do you evaluate someone’s credibility? A degree is not a bad place to start, I’ll admit.If someone has gone to the trouble to jump through hoops about some subject and invest some money, they probably have enough interest to stay informed.But that’s inductive reasoning, at best. What else is there? There’s how they dress. Believe it or not, that’s a big factor in many circles (consciously or otherwise).There are any number of other, external factors that might go into an initial evaluation of a person’s credibility.If you want an interesting book on some of the intangible, unconscious ways we make these judgments, have a look at Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

I suppose that in an ideal world, we would evaluate people’s ideas on their own merits.That is to say, if you want to know if a physicist’s ideas about high energy particle trajectories are correct, you learn high energy particle physics and work through his math.That’s probably not practical in most cases, and is likely impossible for most people.When it comes to complex intangibles (like particle physics and investments) people will gravitate to a source of authority and just trust that expert’s opinion.For that authority figure, I suggest that it makes sense to find someone who servers your interest.

So if you are looking for someone who serves your interest, how can you tell?It’s not unreasonable to concern yourself with how he dresses or how well his office is decorated.Did he take the time to consider your comfort?That’s one aspect of being polite.If you have the wherewithal to get into some of the technical nitty-gritty, it’s wise to check his opinions about big-picture subjects and see if he can state them clearly.Does he disagree with any of the big thinkers of the day?That may not be a bad thing, but he had better be able to explain where he departs from the status quo and why.Can his position be attacked by reductio ad absurdum?

But in the end, one of the biggest deciding factors is this: Follow the money.If you are considering taking someone’s advice, ask who is paying this person to advise you. The big upshot: ask yourself (1.) who made his suit and (2.) who paid for it.

-Peter

Inventions, patents, and how ‘great’ minds think alike

Years ago, I lived with a bunch of roommates in order to save money. It hurt my dating life, but they were a good bunch of guys. Over the course of the five years I lived with them, I had a number of epiphanies, and I would like to share two of them; both concerned dishes.

We moved out of a dilapidated cabin of a house (in which I lived in the partially finished basement) into a much nicer place we named the “Bagley Estate,” in honor of it being on Bagley street. Amusingly, I also worked in Bagley Hall at the U. of Washington. It was like I could never quite escape his legacy, this “Bagley” person. In any case, whenever roommates are involved, dirty dishes (almost) inevitably pile up due to the lack of accountability that comes with anonymity. This is related to a general school of thought about what happens without accountability (NSFW).

I hated the dish situation at the old place, and so I “invented” a “novel” solution. I gave away every piece of flatware and silverware that didn’t fit in a single load of the dishwasher. If the dishwasher was full there were no more dishes. As a consequence, there were very few dishes abandoned in the sink.

It got me to thinking, however, about the possibilities of a dishwasher designed for bachelors. It would have two halves. As dishes were used, they would be transfered from the clean compartment to the dirty compartment. Then, when the dirty compartment was full and the clean empty only one compartment need be run. Once it was clean there would be no need to unload it! Just start the process of transferring the dishes into the now empty compartment. I drew a crude schematic of the device. I considered applying for a patent.

Like most ideas, it had already been both invented and perfected. It is called a Double Dishwasher and there’s a stealth model that looks like two drawers.

If you don’t have $1000, or you don’t own your home, I have another idea. It’s a magnet that attaches to the front of your existing dishwasher. You only use half of the dishwasher and transfer dishes from the clean side to the dirty side (rinse them, of course). Since it will never have a full load, only use the “light wash” feature so you won’t feel guilty about wasting water. Pick one up for just 5.99!

-Peter

A little image of the Bachelor dishwasher magnet

Personal interactions, management, relationships and trust – Part 1

On personal leverage:

Low-level personal interactions come down to leverage. We can get into high-level personal interactions some other time; suffice it to say that they are a function of trust.Frankly, most inter-personal relations that I see are low-trust affairs. These are not bad people, and they don’t (apparently) have a dysfunctional relationship.But there is very little trust being exhibited.So they fall back on leverage.

Leverage 1: Money.This one is widely used in the workplace, home-life and most everywhere else.It can be generalized to other commodities, like sex or a place to live.The whole idea is this:”you want something that I have, and you will only get that thing if your behavior conforms to my expectations.”

Leverage 2: Being a Jerk: Another widely used leverage point at work and at home, people will motivate other people to change their behavior by treating them poorly.”If your behavior is not what I want, I will behave toward you in a threatening and cruel way.”

Leverage 3: Violence: Although not so common in functional relationships, perhaps the oldest way to get people to do what you want is to hurt them physically. It’s what people use when there is very limited communication or extremely low trust, as between warring clans of cavemen or with small children with limited understanding.”If you don’t stop that, I will spank you,” or between so-called adults, “If you don’t think this song is the greatest song ever, I will fight you.” (Ron Burgundy)

Whole books have been written about how to avoid people who use the “Being a Jerk” mode of leverage, like The No Asshole Rule. But avoidance is not the best strategy.Violence is right out.Money is the common denominator, but it’s still a weak way to deal with people.The big upshot: there is a better way.It’s about investing in relationships, not about other peoples’ behavior.

-Peter

The internet and peer review

I went to look at some old Ze Frank videos and see what that guy was up to after my last post. As usual, he’s hard at work organizing a cavalcade of entertainments. One thing that I ran into on a tangent was an article on First Monday about Ze Franks’s experiment. I had forgotten about First Monday. It’s a peer reviewed journal about… well, I was never sure what it was about. I read some articles there at some point and never really caught a theme. So that’s fine, not all journals need a theme, but it does raise issues about what constitutes a peer.

I can’t keep up with all of my professional reading much less some theme-free tangential journal, no matter how interesting one article might be per issue. So I forgot the whole thing. But now I’m reminded, so I’ll tell you about it. The whole peer review system in general is a strange one. If you want to get into a fight after an academic seminar, bring up peer review.

It’s (almost) always anonymous, and there was a court case recently in which a journal was asked to reveal who the reviewers were for a published study and they refused. The idea is that if you’re anonymous, you will be more likely to give your honest, critical opinion. It’s supposed to keep reviewers safe from the repercussions of a bad review.

There’s lots of people saying the whole system is outdated. I would compare it to judging a youtube video by the first 3 comments. In case you’re wondering, the single deepest pit of scum and villainy in the known universe is the youtube comment area. It sucks away my faith in humanity whenever I read it, so I generally do not. This relates to a theory of the internet presented Mike “Gabe” Krahulik (NSFW).

Back to the subject at hand, we’re in an age when continuous peer review in real time is happening constantly all over the internet. The academic community is using a century-old social technology because the consequences of moving to something else are unknown. And, as youtube illustrates, some of those consequences are horrific. So, I sympathize.

-Peter

The changing nature of mass telecommunication

Slashdot covered a story that inspired a whole line of thought. Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of thought, approximately. That represents a unit of time that is vaguely meaningful: it is a very useful product that took a lot of people a lot of time and effort. So how many wikipedias worth of effort do we spend watching television? In the US alone, “we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms.”

And, by my estimate, we have spent about 300 wikipedias watching advertisements every year.

The horror of that statement is still registering in my mind. In a sense, the supreme, central cultural goal of our culture has been to live up to the expectations we see on the glowing tube.

But the beautiful thing is that the tide is shifting. Wikipedia couldn’t exist until now, but times have changed. The old media did not see themselves as the sponge to soak up surplus hours. They saw themselves as the shepherds of those in need of entertainment. Then they saw themselves as the elite, entitled to power and money based on their positions as the conduit through which the consumer saw the world.

Well, their tall towers are crumbling. They had a monopoly on information transmission, and it has been broken. Amusingly, the DOJ had nothing to do with it. They want the DOJ to protect them, but it is too late. It’s as though they controlled the only well in the desert, but a lake has appeared. They want it to be illegal to take water from the lake. They want people to keep coming to their foetid well. Wouldn’t you?

-Peter