Jerry’s post, A Bad Week for Free Speech, covers recent happenings in Britain and India, in which events where changed or cancelled because of, as Jerry writes, “Muslims whose feelings were hurt.” He argues that those things run counter to the requirements of free speech as a key element of democracy.

Jerry writes: “Free speech is the backbone of those democracies, and, except for a few intimideated [sic] democracies like Canada and Ireland, free speech applies to all forms of criticism, political or religious.”  (The links in this quote are in Jerry’s original.)

The link for Canada points to the Wikipedia page on Holocaust Denial, and mention of Canada in that page regards the fact that Canada will generally have none of this Holocaust Denial business.  Since Jerry’s post is mostly about Islam, it’s not explicit how he sees Canada violating the notion of free speech.  I assume that he means that one should be free to deny the Holocaust, because that’s what freedom of speech is all about, and the discussions that will ensue will determine what is true and what isn’t.  If that isn’t the case, then I will certainly retract / rewrite this entry once the facts are made clear to me.

I believe that free speech is important, but that it must be tempered by what is actually known.

That is to say: one can allocate pretty much any topic of discussion into one of three categories: things that we know are true, things that we know are false, and things the truth of which we just don’t know.  Speech that intentionally advocates known falsehoods as if they were true is irrational because it (a) undermines the consistency of our body of knowledge and (b) generally leads to suffering.  These things happen because of the falsity of the statements made and the implications drawn from them used by some to decide on courses of action.  As such, that kind of speech should not be protected by laws of free speech.

When I say “we,” I mean the collective of humanity.  So while it is possible for “us” to know why the sky is blue, it isn’t the case that every individual knows it. But one may learn why the sky is blue because that information is readily available.  It isn’t wrong to be ignorant, but it is wrong to maintain a falsehood in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

This highlights a particular aspect of free speech that I think is often overlooked: humans are at best bounded reasoners.  We regularly reason with incomplete or incorrect information, and our reasoning processes are often themselves incorrect.  We can make up for these shortcomings through discussion and study, but the fact remains that many things that many people believe and say are just wrong.  Unfettered free speech would be fine in a world populated by perfect reasoning agents, but the assumption that we are perfect reasoners undermines the notion entirely.

Holocaust denial is an excellent case in point.  To the best of my knowledge, there is absolutely no doubt that the Holocaust happened.  This evidence has been accumulated over many years and with the work of thousands of individuals.  It results in a body of knowledge that is as good as we can possibly make it.  Denying that it happened is tantamount to denying that the sky is blue or that rocks fall when you drop them.  There are certainly many people who don’t know about the Holocaust.  There are even some who might be shocked to discover than humanity could have ever behaved so immorally, and so resist accepting it.  But the facts are the facts, and eventually every rational person must accept those facts because to do otherwise is to deny truth and reality.

There are, as far as I can tell, only two reasons that a person might persistently deny that the Holocaust happened in the face of the overwhelming evidence: either they are mentally ill, or they seek to foment disharmony and suffering.  In neither case should a caring society allow such speech to occur, because it is in no one’s interest – except the deniers – and their interests are suspect at least and evil at most.

In any case, if there were suddenly new evidence found that cast doubt on the occurrence of the Holocaust, there exists a well-defined mechanism for examining and determining the veracity of that evidence: academia.  If some Holocaust denier were truly in possession of such real evidence, it should be published in peer-reviewed journals, it should be subject to close study by experts in diverse fields that pertain, it should be vetted, replicated, and considered from every angle.  That’s what happens with every other serious claim; why should Holocaust denial be any different?

Instead, Holocaust deniers are weak reasoners, shrill and hateful creatures who try to spread their claims through mainstream media or through self-publication.  Why?  Some of them do it that way because they’re paranoid and believe that academe will quash their work.  Others simply haven’t the reasoning or language skills to pose their arguments in a way that pass muster in a freshman class on rhetoric and argumentation.  I’m sure that there are other reasons, but I quite honestly can’t be bothered to think about them.

Anyone can make a mistake.  I am not advocating for some kind of zero-tolerance on false speech.  I’m referring to the cases that are glaringly obvious.  Some examples are those in the Wikipedia page for Holocaust denial that pertain to Canada.  Those whose speech in Canada was limited are those who systematically continued to write and utter falsehoods in the face of readily available and overwhelming evidence that they were wrong.

There’s little to be gained by allowing entirely unfettered free speech.  (This is even evident in the US Constitution, which does place limits on free speech.)  And there is also much to be lost by the kind of free speech that is accepted in the US.  Consider all the time and money wasted by the right wing nut jobs and by the futile discussions resulting from lies that are spread via certain media outlets.  All that time and money could be used to achieve so many more meaningful goals.  And the unnecessary dissent that such free speech sows in a population just stalls more important and meaningful discussions from even being started.

There’s no need to focus exclusively on the Holocaust either.  Another subject very close to Jerry’s heart – and mine as well – has also been the subject of ridiculous counterarguments: evolution.  There is no doubt that the modern theory of evolution is the best possible explanation of the development of complex life on earth that humanity has ever developed.  It draws from evidence from disparate sciences, all of them not only confirming evolution as our best model, but simultaneously disproving every other model that has been proposed.  If someone finds a serious flaw in the theory of evolution, that person can publish it in the appropriate venues.  Once subjected to appropriate study and verification, there is no reason to think that a new model would not be forthcoming.  But until that happens, the rantings of, for instance, creationists and intelligent design advocates only distract us from progressing and waste precious resources that would be far better spent doing other things.  Creationism and intelligent design, in their current forms, are lies, and should not be afforded the protection of free speech.

There are plenty of things that can be discussed openly, even under Canada’s “limited” form of free speech – important things about international affairs, taxation, social policy, foreign aid, sustainability,… The list is very long.  These are all subjects about which truth is not necessarily available; these are all subjects about which meaningful discussion is absolutely necessary.  Seeking truth in its absence is always a good thing.  But preaching well-known falsehoods can never be good, because it leads to nothing good.  This is why free speech is important, but also why we must be willing to temper it with some limits based on what is known.

Markman writes “When you need to solve a problem in a new way, you have two options. One is pure research and development. The other requires finding knowledge (which we already know) that offers a novel solution.”  He goes on to advise us that we should seek meanings in proverbs to learn how to think differently.  He’s really talking about lateral thinking here, which is also nothing new.  Lateral thinking is hard, because there’s no real method to it; one just practises it until one gets good at it – on the assumption that one can apply lateral thinking to any domain equally well.  The assumption is ridiculous, but that’s another story.

The story of how James Dyson re-designed the vacuum cleaner, as recounted by Markman, is an excellent example of a design method that is quite well known.  We don’t need all the zen-i-ness that Markman suggests.  Here’s how it works.

First: identify a shortcoming.  In the case of the vacuum, it’s that they lose suction.  This should be apparent from user feedback about existent vacuums, product tests, etc.  However, this isn’t quite as easy as it seems, because the only way you can notice is something is bad, is if you have something good to compare it to.  After all, fish don’t know they’re wet.

Second: question the premises.  By looking at the alternative vacuum designs that all suffer the problem, one looks for the common features.  The bag is the common feature.  The assumption is that a bag is necessary.  One then simply asks Why is the bag necessary? In some ways, this step can be done without step 1; but knowing what shortcomings exist is a product can be a big help.

Third: look for functional alternatives to the assumption.  The bag serves certain functions in the vacuum cleaner.  Any technology that can provide the same function is a candidate replacement for the bag.  One can then evaluate those technologies to look for ones that are “innovative.”

That’s all there is to it.  Dyson didn’t look very far to find something.  Indeed, as with so many innovative designs, the answer lay in the designer’s own experience. It might be difficult to imagine that Dyson saw a similarity between domestic vacuums and sawmills, but it becomes simple if you think about function instead of structure.  Vacuums suck dust up using air; the vacuum must therefore internally separate the dust from the air.  That’s exactly what the function of the vacuum bag is – to trap dirt and let air through.  In the sawmill, an industrial cyclone is used to separate sawdust from air.  Notice that the functions served by the bag on the one hand and the cyclone on the other are exactly the same.  It’s much easier to see the connection when you think about function.

And that’s exactly what one needs to do to find an innovative solution to this problem: look for ways of providing the same function as the bag provides.

Indeed, this case is also an example of another technique of developing potentially innovative designs: change the state of matter used to provide a function.  The bag uses mass (the bag itself) to separate dust from air.  One could use liquid to do this – that’s the principle of those wet vacuums for carpets.  One could also use gas – which is how the Dyson vacuum works.  Finally (since matter and energy are related thanks to Einstein), one can use energy – a static electric charge (like in a Swiffer) that attracts and holds dust.

So in the end, all the mumbo-jumbo that Markman espouses might make a consultant rich, but it’s not necessary to design creatively.  Simple methods like this one can work too.

And if after reading this, you go out and invent something amazing, I won’t expect payment.  Just think kindly of me.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

They made me say that. They’re definitely not monkeys!

I wish I’d had more time to write here – and I’m still trying to figure out why the posts having to do with software are the most popular – but with all the other blogs I’ve got going, I’m rather impressed that I could even get this much done.

Remember, I’ve moved productivity-related stuff to http://dofastandwell.blogspot.com/, and atheism-related stuff to http://replacinggod.blogspot.com/.  Only the design-related stuff remains here.

Click here to see the complete 2011 report for this blog.

Anonymous (@YourAnonNews)
12/9/11 9:29 PM
Hating on American Muslims? Don’t you have anything better to do? @Lowes Expect us!

The original tweet is available here.

The matter involved a recent decision by the hardware box store chain, Lowe’s, to cancel advertising scheduled to air during one of TLC’s “reality” shows, called All-American Muslim.  Apparently, this move was the result of pressure exerted in part by groups like the Florida Family Association.

Let’s set aside the absurd premise of the TLC show.  Let’s also set aside the clearly paranoid delusions of the Florida Family nuthouse.

I’m a little troubled by the tone of Anonymous’s tweet, which clearly associates Lowe’s actions with “hate” against Muslims.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think Anonymous is serving a vital social function by providing people with an alternate perspective free of virtually all the shackles with which society has hindered itself.  I think any rational person will be made to think more carefully of their role in society – and, perhaps more importantly, the role of certain institutions – by reflecting on what Anonymous is about.  They tend to “attack” defence contractors, tend to support other organizations dedicated to openness (like Wikileaks), and have worked to shut down child porn sites.  Anonymous isn’t a terrorist group; they’re clearly directed in their work, and, generally, they attempt to undermine organizations that have been seen as corrupt in one way or another.

Now, they’re picking on Lowe’s for pulling advertising?  What about the other companies that have pulled their ads?  (20-ish or 60-ish other companies – depending on who you read – have also pulled their ads from that show.)  What’s Lowe’s done that merits such special attention?

And is it really “hate” to pull the advertising?  Clearly, groups like the Florida Family freaks are islamophobic shit-disturbers of the first order.  It is not at all clear that Lowe’s isn’t just capitulating to that pressure rather than espousing the position.

Why isn’t Anonymous going after the Florida Family Association?  Clearly, the latter is a bunch of right-wing nut jobs that really deserve whatever Anonymous can dish out.

While I can understand the approach taken by Anonymous generally, I’m seriously concerned that without a little more direction, they may end up doing something entirely unacceptable – which would undermine entirely the power that the organization currently holds in the public psyche, and would likely give ultimate victory to the very organizations that Anonymous seems intent on disturbing.

There’s a marketing technique, called cause marketing, that gets you to buy stuff because a fraction of the price you pay goes to some worthy charity.  Sounds great: you get something you want, and so does some charity.

But Prof. Aradhna Krishna of University of Michigan has discovered through her research that the more you pay for cause-marketed goods, the less you’ll donate directly to the charity itself.  You can see that this can end up actually lowering the total funding available to charities.  This problem is exacerbated by the rather vague and opaque ways that the actual amounts given to charity are described.  In some case, the amount donated can amount to only a few percent of the price you pay for an item.  Basically, you can rarely tell how much of the money you spend to buy, say, a t-shirt will actually go to, say, support breast cancer research.  That opens the door for unscrupulous companies to make more profit by only giving a tiny fraction of the unit price to charity.

While Prof. Krishna explains the phenomenon very well, she doesn’t actually propose any easy fixes.  My spidey-design-sense got tingling, and I thought I should offer up some possibilities.

Government regulation.  It makes sense that if food producers are required to tell you how much sodium or fat is in the food you’re buying, they could also tell marketers that they have to specify exactly how much money is going to charity per unit sale.  But governments have been very slow in requiring nutritional labelling on food – in fact, labelling is still not as good as it should be.  If we start now, we might expect to address the cause-marketed goods in a couple of decades or more.

Do we really need to wait that long?

Protests to motivate government. The Occupy Wall Street movement seems to be doing rather well.  Perhaps we need to mobilize people to demand that governments act to deal with this matter.

I don’t see this happening any time soon.  We don’t want to dilute OWS by introducing other goals; OWS has pretty significant goals anyways.  And who’s going to hear a few people complaining about abuses in cause marketing, given the din over the gluttony of big banks and insurance companies?

Direct action and communication. This is, given current events, probably the best way forward.  One could put together, rather easily, an online movement that can include facebook, twitter, google+, and other social networks, as well as online petitions via avaaz or change.org, to begin to spread the word.  Find the right few people to champion it, and it will probably take off far faster than any other way.

But what word should one spread on this matter?

Should one advocate for an abolition of cause marketing?  No, of course not.  There are good instances of cause marketing – why should those efforts be eliminated? No, what is needed is a way to deal with the unscrupulous that doesn’t unnecessarily hinder the scrupulous.

Governments cannot help.  Scruples are in short supply there generally, and they work at a near glacial pace on any issue that doesn’t directly threaten their continued hold of power.  No, governments cannot be expected to work here.

But the grass roots approach could, I think, do the trick.

I think, the message that should be sent out is to boycott companies who do not engage in open and transparent cause marketing.  I think the message must contain the information that people need to spot an opaque cause marketing campaign, and the education to know that there are better ways of getting things done.  Like, for instance, buying a competitor’s product that is not cause marketed, but also then giving directly to a charity the amount that you would think should be donated.

The argument is simple: if we boycott those brands who practise opaque cause marketing, but not those who practise it openly and transparently, then we’ll actually exert pressure on the marketers to only practise it in an ethical and scrupulous way.  I see that as a win-win situation.

What about you? Have you got any other suggestions for improving how cause marketing is done?

During an election, politicians will promise almost anything to get elected.  They do this because they know it works: voters will take their promises as true contracts. Lower taxes; no service cutbacks; more public transit; better roads; shorter wait-times for those seeking medical attention;…whatever.

However, there are few governments that manage to keep more than a very few of their election promises.  I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but I have noticed that over the last 20 years or so, most promises expressed during elections go unfulfilled in later years.

There are two very good reasons for this: (1) politicians do not base their promises on deep analyses of how events might play out; and (2) humans generally suck at predicting technological/societal/cultural progress.

The first claim is largely obvious from the lack of credit offered by political parties to academics who have the expertise and arms-length objectivity to conduct such work.  Sure, sometimes a think tank or some other similar organization will pipe up in favour of this or that political promise, but these are invariably partisan groups and so cannot be expected to produce truly objective proposals.

The second claim is true simply looking back at even just recent history and seeing how many claims made about humanity turned out to be false.  Some interesting examples are at this ETNI page.  No one was able to predict how the battle for equality in the USA would play out.  No one saw 9/11 coming.  No one predicted the Web. (Indeed, even it’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, didn’t imagine what the Web would become.)  When I was a child, there were all kinds of predictions that by the year 2000, we’d all have flying cars and robot servants.  People predicted Canada would have become the 51st US state.  People predicted the laughable Y2K disaster.  It should be rather evident that when it comes to large scale prediction of humanity’s behaviour, we suck.

This means that it shouldn’t be surprising that politicians don’t keep their promises.  By the time they’re in the thick of governing, situations have changed so much that keeping their promises would usually be exactly the wrong thing to do.

All this, of course, doesn’t matter to politicians, because there are only two main goals for any politician: to get power, and to hold onto to it once it’s been got.  And experience tells them that promising things – regardless of their keeping the promises – will improve the odds of achieving their goals.  They don’t care about making promises they know they won’t keep, and they don’t care about breaking their promises once their in office.  Why should they?  Promises are only a means to an end.

This approach wouldn’t work, however, were it not for the spectacular ignorance and self-interest of the average voter.  I once met a woman who told me she would vote for a particular politician, because she knew him and if she needed to, she could jump queues for public services by asking him for a favour.  I asked the woman if she knew what the tragedy of the commons was.  Not surprisingly, she had not a clue.  So, ill-informed, selfish people are choosing the people who will run the country.  Am I the only one who sees a problem with that?

In any case, politicians make these promises to appeal to these voters, because they can, and because no one will hold them to account if they’re elected.  It’s just as well, of course, because most election promises are based on bad reasoning, bad data, or bad motivations.

This is clearly a problem.  We elect politicians for bad (or at least highly unreliable) reasons, to do things that are largely unsupported by real research, and we get angry when they break their promises.  Yet we do the same thing at every election election.  Isn’t that insane?

So, being a designer, I thought of seeing what could be done about this, without having to completely reconstruct the electoral system.

It turns out, there’s a pretty good way for the average voter to decide how to vote, that is based on much harder evidence than any promise a politician might make: base you vote on the track record of politicians and governments.  Forget about what a party promised they’d do, and consider instead what they actually did, whether they promised to or not.

So, for instance,  what did the ruling Ontario Liberals do in the last eight years?  They did some good things, and some bad things.  Okay.  What of those things were most important to you?  How did you benefit from the good things and suffer from the bad things?  Overall, how would you rate their time in office?

Now how did the opposition parties do during those same eight years?  Did they argue well for their positions?  Did they take the “high ground” in debates?  Did they catch the mistakes of the Liberals?  Did they offer any corrections for those mistakes.  How did they perform with respect to the Liberals?

Now of course, this cannot be the only factor you consider.  There is one other thing: the principles that the parties stand for.  Principles, mind you, not promises.  It doesn’t matter who promises to lower taxes – because odds are they won’t, not in the long term.  The real question is why would they lower taxes.  Is it just to buy your vote?  Or is it because the money is really not needed?

These principles are far more robust than any promise a politician can make, because they represent the underlying ideology  - oh, yeah! I went there, girlfriend! – of the party.  (Sidebar: I really don’t understand why ideology is used as a pejorative these days – everyone has an ideology, whether they admit it or not.  But that’s best left for another post.) Which ideology makes the most sense to you?  Now how was each party’s performance with respect to their ideology?  That should help you decide how authentic each party is.  Authenticity is a good thing.  Whether you like the NPD or not, you really need to respect Jack Layton, exactly because he “walked the walk,” he was principled and acted every day on those principles.  You have to respect someone like that, even if you disagree with his principles.  That’s authenticity.

Now, here’s the catch.  Doing all this is hard work, much harder than just listening to politicians at election time promise you the moon with a cherry on top.  You basically have to keep up to date on what the government is doing, every day, every month, every year.  That requires an investment of time and a level of competence that few people have.  But you do get what you pay for: investing more time and effort into understanding what’s going on will make you a more informed (and therefore more competent) voter.

And if voters were more competent, then the politicians who want to get elected would have to rise to the challenge of convincing a more competent voting public that they’re the best candidates for the job.  Which means we’d end up with better politicians, and in turn better government.

So stop listening to politicians at election time – they’ll do you no good.  Use your head, keep your eyes on what your government is doing, and vote based on the track records of the parties, not their usually empty promises.

Atheism makes sense.

A line of argument that one can pursue against the existence of “god” is that there are other explanations that are both simpler and more consistent with everything else we know about the universe.  That is, we aim to find a better explanation for things than “god.”  In this post, I will present the sketch of one such argument.  The details are not particularly robust as I have not yet had the time to research things fully.  However, the gist of the argument should be clear, and I welcome corrections of fact.

Humans are social animals.  This characteristic evolved over millions of years from what I generally call the herd instinct.  Animals group in particular ways – a pride of lions, a herd of moose, a colony of penguins, a community of humans – all serving a single basic function.  There is strength in numbers, and animals that herd enjoy greater safety and security than animals that do not.  Greater safety and security means that animals will suffer less stress and will be able to divert that energy into making more healthy offspring.  Over time, herding animals will overwhelm non-hearding animals, which brings us to the state we have today.  Non-herding animals have evolved ways of surviving, of course, but they exist in niches where herding animals don’t or can’t live.  Humans descended from herding animals, and at it’s foundation, our societies are all just really complex herds of critters that know which fork to use for salad.  How this connects to god will become evident shortly.

Religion predates the Christian god by at least 8,000 years – it even predates the Christian creation myth by some 2,000 years.  Back then, long before Jesus was more than a twinkle in god’s eye, mythology and religion were intimately connected.  Indeed, mythology came first.  It seems that mythology started things off; then religion started; then religion took over from mythology.

Mythology sought to explain nature in the absence of better alternatives.  It turned the unknown into the known, and thus made us feel safer.  We are driven to prefer safety and security because of the instinct of self-preservation, without which life would likely not exist, and which evolved quite quickly from simple chemical reactions, and has been part of life’s genetic makeup ever since.  It isn’t known how mythology started – one possibility is via noticing patterns of stars that look like people or animals.  If those really were organisms outlined out there in the sky, they would certainly be huge and powerful.  Another could be as stories intended to facilitate learning of certain cycles – like the seasons.

It’s rather natural that mythology developed into an explanation of human behaviour as well, because it could “explain” conflicts that were unsettling to one’s safety and security, societal indiscretions amongst cave dwellers and pre-agrarian hunters.  If there were mystical figures that controlled the elements, and if sometimes human behaviour was just as, if not more, bizarre than what was seen in nature, then why shouldn’t there be supernatural forces acting on humans?  The people who developed mythology and religion – over 10,000 years ago – didn’t have the methods and tools needed to study the universe or themselves.  So they did the best they could with what they had.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  One could no more blame them for that kind of thinking than one could blame a six-year-old child for believing the earth is flat.

Here’s where the herd instinct comes in.  It made our progenitors want to protect the herd (their tribe, nation, whatever) because the herd protected them, increasing their safety and security, decreasing stress, and reinforcing the reproduction of more organisms that carried those “social genes.”  In combination with developing psychological capacities for empathy and transference, the herd instinct drove people to try to codify behaviours that would promote safety and security, and they would have used their mythology as the foundation for it.

That codification – which informed people how to behave – became religion.

The difference between mythology and religion is that mythology was descriptive – it tried to describe how things were – whereas religion was prescriptive – it tried to describe how things should be.  The difference arises from the perceived mismatches between what instinct told us and what we saw happening around us.  While mythology proposed explanations for perceived behaviours, religion sought to dictate ways that people could improve that feeling of safety and security by defining how to behave “well,” where anything that provided that sense of security and safety was considered a means to “wellness.”  And mythology provided the background to explain it all.

Our ancestors were driven to explain their herd behaviour so that they could increase the feelings of safety and security that lessened stress and allowed them to flourish.  The explanations they found were mythologies and religions.  If everyone “played nicely,” then everyone felt safer and more secure. Religion codified this as moral behaviour.  Furthermore, one “bad” person could wreck things for a whole community, which increased levels of stress by lowering the safety and security of the herd.  Besides the direct physical consequences of a “bad” act, there was the innate, instinct-driven stress.  Those behaviours became those that were morally “bad.”

Mythology and religion were, however, never very good at predicting things.  They were theories, after a fashion, but we recognize them today as poorly constructed theories.  Thus, the rise of so many mythologies and religions.  Each one was a different attempt to improve on its predecessors and alternatives.

It is also reasonable to think that this same explanation also accounts for the general movement from polytheism to monotheism.  In a polytheistic system, it is possible for factions devoted to one god to become antagonistic to factions devoted to some other god.  This antagonism would permeate the polytheistic society.  In monotheistic systems, antagonistic factions are less likely because there is only one god.  Without that antagonism, one might expect a certain greater degree of safety and security (or conversely, less stress) in monotheistic societies.  Naturally (since evolution is natural), the monotheistic societies would flourish better or faster than the polytheistic ones.

As religion grew in popularity, it gained power as the arbiter of morality, because it “felt right” – that is, knowing how to act morally (and that the immoral would be severely punished in the afterlife if not on earth) increased the safety and security of the individuals and lowered their stress; they could trust the other members of their herd because of the common morality provided by religion.  Furthermore, their trust toward others who did not share their morality/religion increased for the same reasons.  However, religious leaders, being imperfect humans, started to take advantage of the power afforded them.  This led to a vicious circle: when priests did something bad, their church had to cover it up for fear of upsetting the safety and security of the community.  To cover up those bad things, the churches needed to maintain a certain secrecy.  That secrecy provide a mechanism to hide even other questionable acts, and would act as an attractor to individuals with machiavellian tendencies.  We thus have the stage set for the kind of corruption that has cropped up over and over throughout the history of all religions, which is generally no more and no less than the corruption we see in the secular world.

Now, this is one possible explanation of how god and religion came to be.  It is likely imperfect, as I mentioned above, but in broad strokes has relatively few questionable bits.  This explanation is much better than supposing a largely unknowable supreme entity, omniscient and omnipotent (whatever that means) in extent, that works by a set of rules that cannot be defined by common knowledge.  It is a “better” explanation on three fundamental fronts:

It’s consistent with the rest of our knowledge.  We can come up with a variety of explanations for god and religion giving our current and growing knowledge of history, biology, cognition, psychology, anthropology, physics – in other words, science.  We do not need to posit extra bits, entities, powers, states of existence, etc.  And the explanations we develop are entirely consistent with all the other knowledge, including the very obvious knowledge we have about the human-scale reality we perceive every day.

It’s simpler.  Occam’s Razor remains a powerful heuristic to guide thinking.  Having to assume god (and therefore religion) results in a more complex belief system that is not more expressive and, most importantly, not more predictive than one based on scientific and rational thinking.

It’s predictive.  Because it’s consistent with everything else we know, we can use it to predict behaviours in certain circumstances.  For example, one would expect that any action by a religion which acts to increase the perceived safety and security of its adherents will likely propagate throughout the community of its adherents.  If that action also decreases the leads to a decrease of perceived safety and security of non-adherents will likely lead to more confrontation and alienation between the two communities.

This is by no means the only such model that can be constructed.  Many others have been; even more will be.  They will all be better than those based on god and religion, because the god/religion models cannot compete on the three metrics I listed above.

In summary, religion is the source of god – not the other way round – and god and religion are poor models of reality, and should be set aside.

Feedback loops will save us - or destroy us.

This article from CleanTechnica is a great example showing that unlimited growth cannot continue indefinitely.  There are no known cases of perpetual unlimited growth anywhere in the universe.  What’s makes us think we can do better?

The CleanTechnica article notes that the economic crisis in the USA has lessened that country’s environmental impact.  The reason is twofold.  First, there is less consumer demand and fewer consumers who can afford energy (e.g. air conditioning); second, the lessened consumer demand has caused businesses to scale back their activities, which acts as a multiplier effect. Together, these have lowered the base load of electricity needed to keep the country running.  Thus, even though the summer has been very hot, there have not been the blackouts we might have had five years ago, because the base electric load is low enough that the spikes caused by the hot weather are not overwhelming the grid.

I see this as a negative (damping) feedback loop connecting the economy and the environment.  That is, as the economy grows, so does its environmental impact.  But increased environmental impact puts a strain on the economy (think of all the money needed to mitigate environmental impact – money that could have been used for other, more constructive purposes than just fixing things that we’ve broken; think of increased health care costs due to pollution).  Eventually, the economy breaks under that strain.  Unlimited growth stops, even reverses.  And as the economy slows, the environmental impact decreases, easing the strain on the economy, allowing it to eventually grow again.

This is just one of hundreds, if not thousands of loops that exist between activities, be they natural or artificial.  Some of those loops are positive feedback loops: increasing one increases the other, which increases the one even more.  An example of positive feedback is what happens when you bring a microphone too close to a speaker.  These loops can be beneficial, but in extremis they are always harmful.  You can make some interesting noises moving a microphone close to a speaker, but if you leave it there long enough, you’ll blow out the speaker and possibly your eardrum too.  Another good practical example of a positive feedback loop is compound interest.  The more money you invest, the more money you make, which if you reinvest enough will always increase the value of your investment more and faster.  Eventually, you end up having the entire world economy in your bank account (which obviously isn’t going to happen).  At 6% compounded annually, every dollar you invest will become $4 in 25 years, $18 in 50 years, $339 in 100 years, and $115,125 in 200 years. (Note the exponential growth.)  Another positive feedback loop is the downward spiral of the quality of education.  The worse the education that people receive, the less able they will be to make informed voting decisions, which will result in less capable elected officials, who will likely damage the educational system even further.  Positive feedback loops aren’t necessarily beneficial.

Negative feedback loops are the converse of positive ones: increasing one thing increases the other, which in turn decreases the one.  Population and food form that kind of a self-balancing loop (within certain limits).  As a population of organisms increases, so does the need for a food stock.  At some point, the population will exceed the natural size of the food stock. Population will begin to shrink because the organisms simply cannot get the food they need to survive and reproduce.  Inflation is a positive feedback loop, but that works against interest rates to create a broader negative feedback loop.  Inflation has a negative effect on the value of the money that you’re accumulating via compound interest.  The reason why governments try to keep inflation rates as close as possible to interest rates is that the two balance each other and create stability.

I mentioned that there are limits on self-balancing, negative feedback loops.  These are very important because they determine whether the system will survive the changes caused by the elements of the loops.  Going back to the population-and-food example: if the population of organisms increases fast enough past the point that the feed stock can support, and does not drop down quickly enough, then the feed stock will be destroyed, which in turn will destroy the population too. So it is not only the amount of change that matters, but also how fast the change comes about. That is, every system is able to absorb changes only at less than some maximum capacity of resilience defined by the characteristics of the system elements and how they interact.  Once those limits of resilience are passed, the system will inevitably break down.

Unlimited growth is a positive feedback loop that simply cannot be maintained indefinitely.  There is no natural system – not even the universe itself, as far as we can tell – that undergoes perpetual unlimited growth.  In other words, everything dies sooner or later.

It is utterly insane – it’s an abomination – for humans to think that they can possible control nature enough to break this fundamental characteristic.  We may, at some point in the distant future.  But for now we haven’t got the first clue how to do that, no matter what the politicians, economics, and bankers will tell you. We need to design systems such that they will expire gracefully.  Right now, our systems don’t expire at all; they implode (if we’re lucky), wreaking incredible havoc on everyone involved.

Although the economic “downturn” has caused terrible harm to many, many people, we have been lucky because it wasn’t as bad a failure as could conceivably happen. Think of the 2003 blackout, the root cause of which were some untrimmed trees, and which affected some 55 million people.  Imagine if the financial system were to vanish – like the power supply did – even for only a short time.  I’m not trying to be alarmist – I am simply offering an example of the kind of failures that brittle (i.e. hyper-efficient and therefore not very effective) systems can suffer.

This is what happens when we try to beat nature; it will always find a way to get even.  Instead of just fighting against these natural characteristics of systems, we need to start designing systems that work with these characteristics.  We need to understand that everything will end eventually, and we need to design for that death in a way that we can adapt when it happens, instead of rigidly – stupidly – trying to resist the inevitable.

Oh, the Recursion!

I don’t only blog.  I also save items I’ve read – blog posts, news articles, items from magazines – and form them into feeds.  Usually, I’ll try to comment on the item and give my own perspective.  That is, I reblog.

I do this to provide what I think are interesting and useful posts from a wide variety of sources for the benefit of my colleagues and students.  I also do this to further voice my opinion by building on what’s already been written, rather than rewriting everything from scratch.

It’s one of the lovely features of Google Reader.  You can tag and share items.  Each tag can be made into a public RSS feed.  So you can either follow everything I share, or you can follow based only on topics (tags) that interest you.  There’s lots of topics, so your best bet is to go to my Netvibes page and browse the various feeds there on politics, technology, atheism, society, science, and of course design.

Need I say more?

I love Google.  They’re not perfect, but they’re one of the best companies out there.  And, I’d note, though they pay careful attention to what people say about them and their products, it seems that their primary source of direction and innovation is their own expertise.  This may fly in the face of some basic tenets of design, but it’s working for Google.  Indeed, this summer looks to be another fascinating googletime.

Updated Look

Google has been refreshing the themes of most of their products, going for a less cluttered, cleaner, lighter look.  You may have already noticed it in Search and Calendar.  You may not have noticed it in Gmail.  Not sure why that is, but you can in fact change to the new/clean look in Gmail by selecting the Preview theme in your Gmail settings.  (There’s also a Preview Dense theme that has a bit less empty space.)  These themes don’t change the functionality much, but they do get rid of some of the clutter, which improves usability.   And if it’s still too much for you, and you use Chrome, you can cut it back even more by using the Minimalist Theme for {Reader, Mail, Calendar}.  There have been lots of Chrome extensions that tweak the look of Google apps; the common thread to the popular ones is simplicity.  Even though few people complained about Google’s cluttered look, it was obvious that that’s what people liked.

Lesson: users usually have no idea what they really want.  So why should developers trust users more than their own analyses?

Tasks Gets a Facelift

Google tasks has been around for quite a while, and I adore it’s lightweight approach to task management.  But the one thing that I just couldn’t tolerate was the lack of repeating tasks (e.g. tasks that automatically repeat every, say, week – like “take out the garbage”).  Another extremely popular complain was the lack of API for Tasks.

Well, earlier this year, Google finally announced that they were ready to expand Tasks, beginning with a real API, released in May.  And repeating tasks are on Google’s list of improvements.  I’ve already noticed updates to many iPhone apps that sync to Google Tasks.  I expect there to be a flurry of activity in the app world later this year once Google wraps up its mods to Tasks.

The real beauty of Tasks is how it is more and more integrated with other Google apps.  This is a multiplier effect on the usability of each app, and should – assuming Google continues its careful and thoughtful development – lead to a uniquely powerful online facility.

Lesson: simplicity is always good.

The Next Big Thing?

If the new look and the improvements to Tasks wasn’t enough, Google is rolling out a rather massive new project.  Google Plus, or just Google+ (or, for me, G+), is a new social networking platform.  Looking suspiciously like Facebook, the current king of social networking, it is substantially different in operation. While the G+ front page suggests you need to ask – and wait – for an invitation to join, those already on G+ seem to be able to get others in on the fun by simply sending them a message via G+.

G+ introduces 3 interesting concepts: circles (collections of people you know); hangouts (group video chat); and sparks (internet searches that you can easily communicate to your circles to “spark” conversation in hangouts).  These are very clever, very cleanly thought-through functions.  But the real beauty is not in the concept, but in the execution.  Google has come up with a smooth-as-silk visually-oriented way of networking socially, eminently usable, undocumented system (largely because it’s so easy to use, you just don’t need documentation) that is very much in keeping with the spit and polish of other Google products.

The permissions model in G+ is simple – as opposed to the Machiavellian way permissions are managed at Facebook.  This makes it sooo much easier to understand who will see which part of your G+ presence.

Also, there aren’t the bevy of ridiculous apps that keep trying to enter you in contests, and want to communicate directly to all your friends.  I’m sure this is because G+ is still a newborn.  Given that an API for Plus is bound to come out sooner than later, it’s only a matter of a (short) time before developers start building silly apps for G+ too.  But, given Google’s history, I think they will lack, at least for the most part, the greedy crassness of the Facebook apps.

If your interested in migrating to G+ from Facebook, it’s relatively easy – see this lifehacker article.  I think I will be doing that soon myself.  Hopefully, there will soon be a way to sync G+ and Facebook.  Let’s face it, not everyone will switch to G+; this will be a quandary for me – do I keep my Facebook account just to keep in touch with those not on G+?  Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to be able to sync between the two?

However, it works out, I think Google is really onto something.  It’ll be a tough row to hoe – competing against Facebook is going to be hard because Facebook as permeated the market so thoroughly.  But I think Google’s really onto something here – because of the ridiculously tight integration between G+ and its other apps.  I think that integration could very well be the secret of Google’s next success.

And in case you’re looking for me on G+, just search by my full name: Filippo Salustri.

A New Top Bar

While things like G+ are basically an H-bomb of innovation dropped into the social networking landscape, some other things Google’s doing are much more subtle.  Google’s new “top bar” is that kind of change.

The top bar is that stripe across the top of all the Google apps – search, docs, calendar, mail, plus, and so on – that give you generic access to your Google-y things.  It used to be white with blue highlights.  In keeping with the general redesign of Google interfaces, the top bar is now black with red highlights.  And it’s got a special spot, on the right side, for G+ notifications and a button that let’s you share stuff directly to G+ from any other Google-y page.

Now, it is evident that the black top bar is not a hit in some quarters.  Most people complain that it’s “ugly.” I, however, find it quite beautiful and appropriate.  It very clearly sets off the magic Google dashboard from anything else on the page.  It forms an immediate distinctiveness in your brain, which will I guarantee significantly help users know where to move their mice.  I don’t care if people think it’s ugly; I’m with Google on this: the black bar is better.  Eventually, people will understand that.

The Design Angle

I want to come back, in closing, to the notion of how Google designs its products.  (Not that I have any special “insider” information on their development process – but we can intuit some things just based on their products and their visible behaviours.)  Google is notorious for ignoring the pleas of its users on matters of functionality and aesthetic, yet they are usually very responsive with respect to bugs and problems.

This is a very important distinction.  Many companies think that any complaint by a user must be dealt with immediately – and usually it results in knee-jerk reactions that only cause more trouble down the road.  Google correctly recognizes that there are two kinds of complaints.

The first type is basically of the form: your app is supposed to do this, but it doesn’t.  Bugs.  Bad UX design. Bad logic flow.  These are real problems with actual products.  These need to be dealt with immediately – and, usually, Google does just that.

The second type of problem is basically of the form: your app doesn’t do this, but I want it to.  Lots of people think that Google should feel an obligation to address these kinds of problems too.  But it has no such obligation – not in the knee-jerk way that people would expect them to.  Google’s approach to this kind of problem is to quietly gather all the information it can, analyze it carefully, and then ask “What do our users really want?”

That is, users cannot tell designers exactly what they’d want, because they would need to know exactly what it is.  And if they knew that, then it would already exist.  What users do know very, very well is what’s wrong with the way things are.  A good designer will listen carefully to what users say, to understand what it is that the users are saying is wrong.  Then the designer creates something that makes things better.  That designed thing might not be what the users want, but it probably is what they need.

Google Tasks is a great example.  Immediately after it was introduced, users started begging for Google to add repeatability (i.e. having a task that automatically repeats every, say, week).  Pretty obvious feature, right?  Well, google remained silent for years.  Then, suddenly, Google announced that it has a list of things that Tasks needs – clearly demonstrating that they had been listening to the users – and that over the course of this summer, all manner of new things Tasks-like would be coming out, and kicked it off with the release of the Tasks API, which will allow 3rd parties to write code that can access and manipulate Google Tasks from anywhere.  As a productivity geek myself, I welcome this with intense glee.  Why didn’t they do it sooner?  Because they weren’t sure that’s what users really needed.  And, obviously, they needed to make sure that any changes to Tasks wouldn’t mess up its integration with other Google apps.  By now, I’m sure they’ve done the major design work for all the updates to Tasks – all that’s left is to implement them.  A challenge, when your product is used 24/7 all around the world.

Some might accuse Google of arrogance for not keeping the public informed of its plans.  That’s just crap.  They’re a company who let people use their products for free.  The arrogant ones are the self-absorbed users who think Google owes them anything.

But there are other reasons for holding things back.  One reason is, since no one’s perfect, mistakes could derail a scheduled release.  Better to just spring the product on people than risk missing a self-imposed deadline.  Also, it’s not good to let people get their expectations up about a new product.  The more a developer lets users build their expectations, the easier it is for those users to be disappointed when the product is finally made available.

This notion of Google not focussing too much on their users is serendipitous because it fits nicely with my recent post about Don Norman and his disapproval of human-centred design.  This is a perfect case in point: Google treats their user community as equals among the many, many forces that influence the success or failure of a product.  I would wager that Google embodies what Norman calls activity-centred design.

Google is, perhaps, another one of those fabulous companies (Apple being another) whose designers are informed by their users without kowtowing to them.  They do not just have knee-jerk reactions to user comments like, say, Microsoft (aka small and limp), does.  They use user response as data, they gather it, analyze it, draw conclusions from it that are within the context of their own design expertise.

And that is as it should be.