Annoying the user can be a feature
Google typically has a minimalist aesthetic, so why does Gmail display an obnoxious yellow box whenever you go “invisible” in Talk? Economics to the explanatory rescue!
For those of you who don’t know, when you’re “invisible,” you can see and IM other people who are online but other people can’t see you. This asymmetry can yield a classic free-rider problem — I can get the benefit of bothering people without risking the potential distraction or pain of talking to someone I don’t want to, but in doing so I make the service less useful to others who would wish to bother me.
So if it were really easy to be invisible, then on balance too many people might go invisible, making the feature useless for everyone. The annoying box makes me far more likely to stay visible, forcing me to give back a little bit.
Of course people go invisible all of the time — there are times when it’s worth it to avoid the distraction — but unless I’m specifically avoiding distractions I typically stay visible because it’s just a tiny bit annoying to be invisible.
Windows Vista’s UAC dialogs were supposed to be annoying as well. The idea was that developers would want to avoid annoying their users by using unsafe OS calls and so software written for Windows would become more secure making things in aggregate better for users. In this instance it seems users wound up blaming Windows more than software developers, but it may have actually pushed developers to be more safe. Windows 7 users will likely benefit from the pain that Vista users suffered.
URL aesthetics
Maybe this is just me being weird, but I have pretty strong opinions about the way I like URLs to look. Let’s look at some URLs:
Vimeo has great attention to detail in their UI; part of that is great URLs. No implementation details are visible. It’s obvious what the page is — it’s a watch page for one video on vimeo. Better, the URL is so short that twitter leaves it be which makes me more likely to click on vimeo links (I believe).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I
Not bad from youtube here. Still pretty short and I can see the key parts. I’d like it better if the video id weren’t a parameter so http://www.youtube.com/v/gRzMhlFZz9I would be much nicer.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/218236 and http://www.slate.com/id/2232555/
Newsweek and slate do well here. /id is a short prefix and it’s obvious what the page is.
http://ffffound.com/image/2cc1a600e1b8f1d83611f6cdf2142a1ecb7cc88b
fffound has the right idea, but the key is too long. I know they have a lot of images, but it’s not that many.
http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2009/09/academic-freedom-isnt-free.html#more or http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/why-are-women-so-unhappy/
Blogs are frequently awful at this. Superlong, repetitive, who cares about the date, who cares about reading the subject — my eyes aren’t even going to get that far. Booo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/middleeast/19iran.html?ref=global-home
Nytimes is awful. Date is needless, two keyword, implementation details spilled everywhere. Boo.
It’s true that keywords in the url influence search rankings a little (see the yt video above) so I can understand putting an optional slug at the end like hypem does:
http://hypem.com/#/track/935285/Birdman+-+More+Milli+Feat+Drake+NO+DJ+
but I’d rather that not be there because it’s so ugly.
What about www? I personally like the no-www style like http://rc3.org/, but non-techie people use the www as a cue that it’s a URL so I can deal with it.
So our URLs here on stuckk.net are OK, but we could do better by dropping the /post/
Changing my mind about GDP alternatives
I now think switching to a measure of well-being that includes some objective and subjective measures of happiness is probably a good thing on balance.
France commissioned a nobel-rich group to look at it. The report offers three broad categories of problems with GDP that an alternative measure might address:
Classical GDP Issues - issues with GDP everybody agrees on like pricing an individual’s use of government provided healthcare or households engaged in child care. Or more wonkish problems like accurately capturing capital depreciation.
Quality of life - things that affect our life broadly not captured in production. Key among these are leisure, consumption, crime and health. More controversially, the report would include subjective measures of wellbeing like so called “ladder of life” scores.
Sustainability - if we’re going to take a hit now for future environmental preservation then it would be best if we had a measure that captured that
GDP is pretty precise, captures a lot of what we think of as well-being and has been collected for a while, but it seems like we should probably fix the “classical” problems at the very least.
I’m inclined to think the sustainability section would be immensely important as well. If we have pride in our GDP, good environmental policy is going to be difficult. And don’t think the warm fuzzies we get from stupid things like GDP numbers don’t matter; two examples:
First, at least in one experiment, putting a smiley face on people’s energy bills when they had below average consumption had a significant effect on their consumption patterns. Second, in oldschool Sim City, the game would play a cheering sound when you reduced taxes and a booo sound when you increased them. But that was based just on the change, not the absolute value, so if I wanted to soak up my citizens’ wealth, I’d increase taxes to 20% and then drop them to 19% just to end on that positive note. Silly, but I bet I’m not the only one.
Subjective measures like “ladder of life” are rightly a bit more controversial in my view. It’s tough to say exactly what they measure. Some people think Bhutan is nuts; the Economist is mixed. I’d probably go with a measure that didn’t include them just to avoid controversy.
Do we understand religion and science the same way?
Some people view religious beliefs and scientific facts as derived from distinct mental processes. Facts are derived from some sort of cognitive, rational evaluative process, while beliefs are based on faith or revelation.
As with most questions about our minds, I’m interested in what neuroscience has to say about the question. Coincidentally, there’s a new study in PLoS one comparing the neural correlates of religious belief with those of non-religious belief.
Under one interpretation, these results show that people experience religious beliefs on the same mental level as non-religious ones. If that’s true, then we should expect Religious beliefs to affect our behavior just as much as beliefs about, say, a round earth.
Religious people do seem a bit more altruistic and nice than non-religious ones, and some have suggested part of the explanation might be that religious people believe God is watching all of the time.
Two other comments:
First, this should undercut the arguments of people who wish to argue that religion and science are completely compatible because they’re simply different ways of understanding the world (looking at you, Joe).
Second, this research displays, once again, the power of the fMRI to answer important questions that used to be left to philosophical rumination.
A brief hiatus…
Wansley and my contract period ended September 20th. We’re taking a week long break to decide whether to contract again and, if so, under what terms.
If you have any good contract ideas (maybe how to solve the quantity/quality problem), leave a comment.
The nationalism of liberals and conservatives
Ben Casnocha recently argued that while liberals point to conservatives’ bastardization of patriotism for aggressive foreign policy, they are equally guilty of appropriating nationalist ideas for their own aims. In particular, through nationalistic trade policies (“Buy American”, tariffs, etc.) liberals undermine the American economy, as well as endangering the livelihoods of the poor in developing countries for whom liberals often claim to advocate.
Casnocha also claims that protectionism is “more dangerously nationalistic” maybe because this brand of patriotism “is less understood, especially by those who hold it”. This is bizarre. The use of patriotism to send America into war for often dubious reasons is at least as dangerous and poorly understood (how many people can articulate a good reason for invading Iraq?). The clearer point in the comparison between liberals and conservatives is that we should be skeptical whenever and wherever patriotism is used to justify policy, as it can be easily employed to disguise baseless and irresponsible government decisions.
Why would hell exist?
Marcus Gadson, a Dartmouth student and friend who blogs at The Gadson Review, has a post offering a justification for the existence of hell within the Christian religion. He offers three possible reasons - retribution, incapacitation (don’t let sinners pollute hell), and deterrence. I don’t really think these are sufficient for two reasons:
First - Hell is a disproportionately severe punishment. All three of Gadson’s justifications for the existence of hell are only valuable up until they violate the constraint that the punishment not be too severe. Perfect deterrence in society could be achieved through brutally torturing all convicted criminals, but we generally accept that such a punishment would be unjust. Indeed, in order for Gadson’s retribution point to work there has to be a proportional relationship between the crime and the punishment - it would be a very strange kind of retribution if the whole range of possible crimes were met with punishments that were arbitrarily lax or severe in each case. That means, that in addition to proving hell serves a purpose, Gadson also has to prove that hell doesn’t violate the proportionality constraint.
But hell can never be a proportional punishment because it is an infinite punishment for necessarily finite crimes. Transgressions committed on earth which are limited in scope by time and physics are punished for eternity with infinite, divine wrath. Gadson counters this argument by saying:
Now, we might be tempted to think there’s nothing so bad that an eternity spent in hell is a proportionate punishment. But that is from our view as humans, not God’s. Reading through the Bible, you find that God has really a low threshold for what constitutes a sin (at least in human eyes). Christ says that “whosoever looks at woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
It’s true that God does have this high standard, but it doesn’t really give a reason why, except that he’s God and can do what he wants. Given that Gadson is explaining why hell exists as a punishment for earthly sins, I think he has an obligation to do more than say it exists because God wanted it to. Given that it’s such a disproportionate punishment, I don’t think hell - as usually construed or understood - can actually be explained through Gadson’s judicial framework.
Second - I think one of the problems of analyzing the existence of hell under this framework is that it assumes God and society have analogous purposes for punishment. The best example of this problem, I think, is the deterrence argument. When societies set up laws and punishments, they don’t really care what citizens’ motives are for following those laws; it doesn’t matter whether someone chooses not to break the law because he wants to be moral or because he fears punishment. The same is not true for God. Because Christianity focuses so much on the personal relationship with God, the motive is what matters the most. I don’t think deterrence can really explain the existence of hell because I don’t think heaven/hell are meant to act as a carrot/stick combo for conversion. Assuming genuine conversion is what’s really important, badgering people into professing belief doesn’t make sense.
I think what this really means is that in order for hell to “work” within Christianity, it can’t really be understood as a terrible place of eternal punishment. Some thinkers have thought of hell as just an entrenched continuation of life on earth, a mundane, eternal life of separation from God. Regardless, some other alternate understanding (maybe just that hell is death and that’s all she wrote), which is less focused on hell as retribution or a deterrent, would make more sense.
Amazon vs. Target
I have recently shopped both at Target and Amazon, and had a different experience with both.
It was a bit tricky to find what I needed at Target (black socks, if you must know). I couldn’t see all of signs overhead and it wasn’t obvious to me whether to look where the shoes were or where the boxers were. It reminded me of old school web portals that used to keep a categorized directory of the web by topics. Google’s is [still online][gd].
Web portals were dominated by search engines once they started working because search engines were far faster — only one page had to load rather than three. Moreover, users don’t have to go through the entire conceptual hierarchy that leads to the concept they want.
The search-engine for Target would be something like the search kiosks in Borders, or better yet a Target iPhone app (or mobile webpage!) that would tell me where things were located.
Amazon on the other hand has a great search experience — if I don’t find what I want right away from a search on Google, I’m usually only a few clicks away thanks to the “Users who viewed this purchased..” feature among other things. The problems with Amazon are immediacy, it takes to long to get things I need, expense, it’s more expensive to ship things than to pick them up, and exploration, I’m much more hesitant to buy a new product if I haven’t held it in my hand or seen it in person.
I think at least in the short run, Target’s problems are easier to overcome. Amazon now has it’s own brands, so maybe they’re becoming more of a traditional retailer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of clever brick-and-mortar manifestation of Amazon in the next 10 years.
The value of Twitter
Everybody has an opinion about Twitter. Robert Scoble thinks it’s great, but those smarties over at the Economist’s Free Exchange blog think it’s going nowhere.
For the longest time nobody thought Facebook was going to make any money, but now they’re cash flow positive. It’s also important to remember that Google was not profitable for some time after it’s launch as well.
I’m in the “Twitter is going to be a success” camp. I think the risks they face are organizational more than anything else. Their product is great if they can just do the right things to keep it growing and make money off of it. I’ll try and convince you that it’s a viable business in the rest of this post.
Real time search - I think this has been a bit over-hyped but it bears repeating. Twitter lowers the bar for content creation and as such, get access to a wealth of information that Google, as yet, cannot see. Blogs will report things, but tweets will come faster. Moreover, tweets will tell you more quickly what things are useful as people tweet links to articles faster than bloggers will post links to other blog posts.
The impact of this is that two types of content: information too geographically isolated to be caught by blogs and information too fresh for blogs won’t make it into Google’s results, but will into Twitter’s search results.
It’s unclear whether Twitter has the tech to do the real time search ranking in-house or whether they’ll just license the firehose API that exposes all tweets in real time to Google/Bing, but it’s certainly a valuable resource.
CRM - People tweet about their experiences with businesses, good and bad. Tweets feel very personal and immediate, so there’s an opportunity for businesses to respond to concerns raised on Twitter and earn customers’ incredibly valuable good will. In practice, this means that businesses need tools to track tweets and reply easily.
As with search, it’s unclear whether Twitter will build their own tools in-house or just license to third parties. Either way, it’s clear there is value to be given there. Personal responses from companies are valuable and hard to come by. Verified accounts are the beginning of Twitter’s interactions with businesses and if you believe Scoble’s account, there is a lot more to come on that front.
Ads - This is the basic webby thing to do, but you can’t just put ads on a page an expect to get rich. The reason Google is so successful is that doing a search for “30 GB Hard drive” is a really good indication that I’m interested in buying a hard drive, so seeing a link then is valuable.
Some tweets are similar. Once I tweeted about how the battery on my Dell laptop had died. In reply, one battery company tweeted at me suggesting that I check out their website for a replacement. Twitter could be slightly smarter about this; an ad could appear just above my tweet automatically based on key words or phrases — searches are less than 140 characters and Google seems to do a good job figuring it out.
It’s true that the vast majority of tweets aren’t monetizable — bits of celebrities’ lives aren’t incredibly interesting — but many searches aren’t monetizable either. The key thing is scale. If Twitter manages to continue expanding at an extremely rapid pace, they have a real shot at becoming a brilliantly successful business.
It’s not obvious that they’ll make the most of what they have, but what Twitter has is incredibly valuable to a lot of people. I believe the doubters will be proven wrong.
What France and Bhutan have in common
France is moving toward using a metric for national happiness in its economic policy, something Bhutan has done for decades. For France, the transition is rather transparent, since the country hasn’t been performing as well as other developed countries in GDP terms, but should gain GNH (Gross National Happiness) points for its liberal labor and health policies.
GDP and per capita GDP are mostly valuable as proxies for happiness, so looking at other measures of well-being makes sense. This is especially true for countries like France, because wealth is a worse proxy for happiness the more you have of it:
In the early stages of a climb out of poverty, for a household or a country, incomes and contentment grow in lockstep. But various studies show that beyond certain thresholds, roughly as annual per capita income passes $10,000 or $20,000, happiness does not keep up.
Since we’re pretty clueless about what makes people happy, it’s still useful to look at measures like GDP. But I think it’s important not to think of GDP as a ends in itself.
