Incentives
Incentives rule the world.
Thoughts from John Karahalis
Incentives rule the world.
I just heard about Tin Can. What a great idea! It's a physical phone for kids that can connect with other Tin Cans for free. For a monthly fee, it can even connect with other phone numbers. Only approved contacts are supported, and best of all, there are no apps! It's an old concept, of course, but something about it seems so exciting, novel, and fun. Imagine kids spending less time on screens and more time actually talking to their friends, building real communication skills. This is what the world needs.
I hate to criticize an organization as wonderful as Mozilla, but I must say, Proton is the company I wish Mozilla had become. We need an alternative to Google, a suite of competing web applications that put users first and protect privacy. Proton is accomplishing exactly that.
You get what you measure.
If cost is fixed and you measure speed, you'll get speed, but not quality. If cost is fixed and you measure quality, you'll get quality, but not speed. If you measure page views or ad impressions, your company may become a clickbait factory. If you measure messages sent within your app, your app might begin boosting outrageous content that makes people argue all the time. (Yes, I'm talking about social media.) If you're a bank and you measure account openings, your employees just might commit fraud to “get those numbers up.”
Incentives rule the world. If you decide to incentivize something by making a measurement a goal, be sure you understand the unintended consequences. Better yet, don't make a measurement a goal at all. As they say, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when a metric becomes a goal, people will inevitably game the system, and you might be surprised by what they do to “win.”
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This is a little sci-fi.
I'm not a physicist or a philosopher, but I'm interested in how the universe works. One thing I'm curious about is time. Believe it or not, nobody really knows how time works, and effects like time dilation show that time does not work the way we intuitively think it does. Personally, I think time is like an undirected graph of cause and effect (or effect and cause), a directionless web of events, even though it feels like it has a forward direction.
When folks start talking about this, they inevitably mention that it's not possible to travel backward in time. There's a problem with that statement, though, and it only occurred to me recently. When people say it's not possible to travel back in time, or that entropy tends to increase, and so we don't generally see wine glasses unshatter and float back to their original resting places, they're really saying that it's not possible for external events to move backward in time while they themselves move forward in time. Why should that be possible? Why should someone be able to retain their memories and continue aging while everything around them reverses? That would be like the food in my oven cooking while the food in my microwave becomes cold again. Maybe it's simply not possible for time to “move in two directions” at once; the events that led me to start the oven also led me to start the microwave. How could one set of events be reversed without the other?
Maybe backward time travel does happen, but we don't notice it. By analogy, if we were living in The Sims and the “player” decided to rewind the game, causing the most recent frames to be played back in reverse order, wouldn't our memories and experiences also be undone frame by frame? Wouldn't it feel exactly like experiencing it “forwards”, one “frame” or one moment at a time? The “me” from a frame one hour ago would have the idea to write this post, and he wouldn't have the memory of having already started it.
I know this is pretty out there, as far as my posts go. Maybe this is easily refuted by people who actually know what they're talking about. But it's interesting to me. And hey, maybe it would make for a fun Star Trek plot point! “We are going back in time, we just don't remember it!“
“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”
—John Lennon paraphrasing others in his song “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)
I don't remember where I first heard this. It may have been spoken in a conversation about road rage. I think there's something very true about it, though, and it speaks to much more than driving.
When someone is unkind to you, they're probably not reacting to you. They're probably reacting to the last person who upset them.
In other words, when one is unkind or behaves strangely toward you, especially when there is no obvious explanation for their behavior, their annoyance may be misdirected. They may be treating you the way they wish they had treated someone else, someone who came before you. It's not fair, but that's life.
Apparently, psychologists call it displacement.
[The] social internet is, I would argue, not a net positive for humanity, even if it has greatly benefited some of us who use it a lot.
—John Green in Am I Cigarettes?
What is the price of lettuces? An obolus perhaps. If then a man gives up the obolus, and receives the lettuces, and if you do not give up the obolus and do not obtain the lettuces, do not suppose that you receive less than he who has got the lettuces; for as he has the lettuces, so you have the obolus which you did not give… Give then the price, if it is for your interest, for which it is sold. But if you wish both not to give the price and to obtain the things, you are insatiable and silly.
—The Enchiridion of Epictetus, as translated by George Long
In other words, don't complain about a trade-off you're willing to make. You can buy an apple at the farmer's market, or you can keep your money and leave without one, but you can't demand an apple and refuse to pay. That just makes you a jerk.
In the same way, if your spouse dislikes being corrected, you can correct them and accept their annoyance, or you can let it go and appreciate the peace, but you can't correct them and then complain when they become annoyed. Well, even then, you can. You just can't force other people to think you're being reasonable.
Go small.
Photos are more interesting when much of the landscape or subject is cropped out. (Too many people take full-body portraits, which I often find utilitarian and boring.) Songs are more interesting when instruments can be appreciated individually. Try listening to “Sailor's Tale”, but only listen to the drums, or the bass guitar, or my favorite, the mellotron.