Author: Robin

Stress is generally thought of as a bad thing, but it occurred to me last night that there are really two very different kinds of stress. The type which I find very unpleasant is based on fear; fear of not finishing something you are supposed to do, or in general fear of being unable to prevent an unwanted scenario. For example, “can I finish my thesis and graduate in time.”

In contrast, the other type of stress I see as part of what makes life worth living: the desire to do more than might be possible. This type of stress is proactive, based on things you want to do, and comes with excitement. I think it is part of what Cervantes means by the “impossible dream.” For example, “can I make my thesis really excellent in the time I have left.”

Stress about grades can also illustrate the difference: worrying about the negative consequences of getting bad grades vs. striving for good grades to achieve positive consequences. It’s related to the optimistic vs. pessimistic explanation styles described in positive psychology.

I came across an interesting article about the importance of being able to “write in the margins” and how that functionality has been neglected in computer systems in favor of the designer trying (in vain) to figure it all out ahead of time. I love this quote:

The fuzzy intersection of official and unofficial data has never been a comfort zone for information technologists.

How true…

It also follows a theme that has been recurring lately, which might be summed up as “computer science is hard:” in a sense we are trying to re-create the world from scratch, which is a very difficult job! Paper gives you all sorts of abilities “for free” but every new function on a computer (such as the ability to “write in the margins”) must be explicitly designed.

Recently published was some really important advice from Steve Jobs. Well, he was just answering interview questions. But I take it as advice. On getting things right:

“At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn’t great. It just wasn’t great. We stopped production for five months…. We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn’t had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.

“We called that the ‘story crisis,’ and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There’s been one on every film. We don’t stop production for five months. We’ve gotten a little smarter about it. But there always seems to come a moment where it’s just not working, and it’s so easy to fool yourself – to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn’t.

“Well, you know what? It’s been that way with [almost] every major project at Apple, too…. Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, ‘I just don’t love this. I can’t convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we’ve ever done.’

“And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we’d made and ideas we’d had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, ‘All this work you’ve [done] for the last year, we’re going to have to throw it away and start over, and we’re going to have to work twice as hard now because we don’t have enough time.’ And you know what everybody said? ‘Sign us up.’

“That happens more than you think, because this is not just engineering and science. There is art, too. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of one of these crises, you’re not sure you’re going to make it to the other end. But we’ve always made it, and so we have a certain degree of confidence, although sometimes you wonder. I think the key thing is that we’re not all terrified at the same time. I mean, we do put our heart and soul into these things.”

On management style:

“My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.”

On managing economic downturns:

“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”

Of course, that’s why it’s amazing to have a huge pot of cash you can draw from. College endowments are very useful for the same reason (plus the fact that it earns interest).

Apple has really done some amazing work. And they are amazing at focusing on a small number of products.

“I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn’t have seen it coming.”

“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.”

Man, I went to a cool talk today given by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger who recently wrote a book called Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Remember the essay I posted a while back called “Climate change is not an environmental issue”? They were basically backing me up all the way on that viewpoint. It’s always great when someone famous agrees with you AND gives you even better reasoning behind the position.

Their core message, however, which was not part of my essay, is that massive government spending on clean energy research is going to be the primary way we solve the climate crisis. They pointed out that massive government spending is what led to computing, the silicon chip, the economies of scale for the silicon chip ($1000 to $20 per chip in 7 years), and ultimately “silicon valley.” They also cited the very interesting fact that the international treaty banning CFCs (to protect the ozone layer) was not ratified until alternative chemicals to CFCs became available. Analogously, serious global warming treaties will probably not be passed until clean energy technologies as cheap as coal are actually available.

Their position is that carbon taxes are really only useful for raising the necessary money to massively invest in clean energy technologies – so that the true cost of these technologies become competitive with fossil fuels. They think an $80 billion per year investment will be what it takes. This is a lot, but pales in comparison to the defense budget of over $500 billion. This is reasonable for American taxpayers to swallow if they are convinced that it contributes strongly to issues they care about, such as national security and economic security.

Part of what’s amazing to me is that I was already fascinated by solar panels back in high school. Why was that? I guess it just seemed clear to me that the most efficient way to get energy would be to take it directly from its source: the sun. Every other method is incredibly indirect (fossil fuels stunningly so). Four years later, I put much of my savings into solar panel stocks (that was a good choice). And now we have a very clear case being made that solar panels may well be a major factor in tomorrow’s energy sources – it’s just going to take enough research and economies of scale to make them sufficiently inexpensive.

I bought their book (and got it signed) and am looking forward to reading it.

I watched bits of the Clinton-Obama debate that aired tonight and it occurred to me that one of the things Obama does effectively is talk on the meta-level about his campaign. For example, he often says, “I wouldn’t be running for President if I didn’t think ____.” He also talks about how his campaign itself has proved his ability to inspire people. Talking on this meta-level makes him more believable in my eyes – it’s an invitation to “imagine if you were him” to see why, if you were him, you would do what you are claiming.

I also just have to put it out there that it’s much more fun to listen to Obama than to Clinton. Clinton makes me anxious. Obama makes me relaxed. I don’t think this has much to do with whether they will make good presidents, but I’m certainly more likely to listen to them on the radio/podcast if it’s a pleasant experience.

By the way, I have a new way of thinking about Graph Sketcher (my software project): visualizing information about the future.

Lots of software lets you plot out data that you already have. But can you think of any applications that let you plot out data that you don’t have? At first glance, most people seem to find this whole notion crazy. But every day people need to make decisions about the future, based on very uncertain information. A lot of the time, it is overkill to fool around with formal predictive models, because the whole thing is so uncertain anyway. But at the same time it’s very helpful to visualize what you do and do not know. Hence: just sketch it in with Graph Sketcher.

I thought this was a pretty interesting blog post about the stresses of being an entrepreneur. Much of it is kind of obvious, like accepting mistakes, worrying about the next paycheck, etc. But the one that actually worries me most is:

“What is difficult (for me), and unexpected by many new entrepreneurs, is the psychological impact of having to leave things undone, not doing one’s very best work, and having to compromise on almost everything.”

I learned from personality tests that one of my core strengths is “appreciating excellence.” I’m not sure I could deal with a job where I was forced to do shoddy work. I can live with not being able to do everything – that’s inevitable – but the things I do choose to do, I want to do well, and thoughtfully.

I think in practical terms this could mean looking for startups that are “in it for the long haul” rather than ones that are planning to be sold to a bigger company which will just redo everything anyway.

I recently attended Patrick Winston’s famous talk on how to give good talks.  I will summarize what I took away as most interesting or important.

Starting.  Do not start with a joke.  Do provide a promise of empowerment within the first two minutes – why the audience should listen to you.

During.  Cycle back to main points.  Provide points in the talk where people can wake up and rejoin the narrative.  Use “near miss” examples – ideas that are similar but not yours.  Use logos and simple graphics.  Use the board.  Keep your hands visible, at your side or pointing/gesturing.  Ask rhetorical questions that are at the right level of difficulty, and wait long enough for responses (it feels like an eternity).

Ending.  Point out how you have delivered on your promise.  Tell a joke so that the audience remembers the whole talk as fun.  Ask for questions and always repeat the question before answering it.  Finally, “salute” the audience but do not thank them (this is incredibly hard).

Winston also talked about some specific “special cases” of talks.  For job talks, evaluators are looking to see that you have a vision and have done something about it.  He says you have 5 minutes to prove this, and a good method is to use narrowing steps to situate your work in the vision.  And the final slide should be “contributions” (not “conclusions”), so they can keep staring at what you’ve done.

Finally, he talked about “getting famous” which really means making your idea sticky.  His outline of how to do so is similar to in the book Made to Stick.  He uses 5 points:

• a memorable “symbol” for the idea
• a memorable “slogan” for the idea
• a “surprise” element that will be talked about
• a “salient” that captures the central idea
• a captivating “story” that explains the idea.

For me, the most surprising advice in his talk was to not thank the audience.  I had always taken it as given that you end by saying “thanks” – but Winston made a strong argument that you should resist the urge, because you want to avoid implying that it was an imposition on the audience to come.  Instead, you can talk about how great an audience they were.

You know, it’s amazing.  Back in high school I took a philosophy class and started telling people – half jokingly – that the famous philosophers got famous mostly because they promoted their particular idea to the point of absurdity.  Now I’m reading Made to Stick (by Chip & Dan Heath) and they are making the case that this is exactly right – ideas that “stick” lastingly do so primarily because their promoters focus on a single core argument, subsuming the details and excluding all other arguments.

In high school, the absurdity of the philosophers’ prose became readily apparent because of the juxtaposition of viewpoints that we would read, sometimes in a single homework assignment.  Philosopher A would say “X absolutely must be true; for these reasons there is no way I could possibly be wrong.”  Then Philosopher B would come along and say “here is why X is completely impossible; there is no way it could possibly be true.”

Philosophers A and B obviously could not both be correct.  Yet both sounded 100% confident that they were.  Thus I concluded that all famous philosophers stuck with an idea and sounded 100% confident about it.

Needless to say, Made to Stick refines this observation considerably.  It’s not usually enough just to have an elegant core argument and sound authoritative; there are other important features such as “unexpectedness” and “concreteness”.  Looking back, the philosophers did these things pretty well too.

So I guess my saying remains half joking – but really only half.

Scott Hudson (of CMU HCII) gave an excellent talk today, of which the take-away point was to balance the value of information with the attentional cost of displaying that information.

In an information-saturated world, the scarce resource is attention.  It’s easy to forget the significant cost associated with any given piece of information – the time spent absorbing it (or being interrupted by it).  This is similar to the sometimes-forgotten truth about innovation that figuring out how to do things more cheaply is at least as important as doing things that before couldn’t be done.

In interface design, Scott aims to maximize the “C*I-A model”:  (communicative ability) * (importance) – (attentional cost).  In other words, you show the things that convey more information that is more important and have low attentional cost.

On interruptibility, he advocates following the human 7-step process of greeting negotiation:

1. sighting
2. orientation – looking back
3. distant salutation (head toss, which is culturally independent)
4. approach (step towards and look away)
5. end approach (stop and look up)
6. close salutation (handshake, utterance, etc.)
7. reorientation (90° conversational stance)

If computers were better at following this type of process, they could more effectively negotiate for a user’s attention.