essayist

Way before bots/LLM, I disciplined myself (most of the time) to write email with "in brief" at the top, followed by "Details".

"In brief: Can you bring a dozen brownies to the noon lunch tomorrow?

Details: Dessert plans fell through. Your brownies are the best, and you owe me..."

This structure is liberating for me. I can distill what I want/need into something brief and even brusque, knowing that people will read on if the need justification. It also makes me clarify what I want. Probably not appropriate if I'm too far down the totem pole from the addressee.

It's 1996 or so. The web is new. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) at the US Department of Transportation collects ontime arrival data for all the major airlines, by flight. It publishes some summary reports, but what people really want to see is how all the flights from, say, JFK to LAX performed in a given month.

The monthly database textfile is not that large, but it is unwieldy.

I'm a web consultant, but database backends are not yet a thing, at least not for us. Static webpages, all the way down.

So I use a script to parse the database into a series of text files and directories. E.g. JFK/index.html is a list of all the airports receiving flights from JFK, e.g. LAX, SFO, etc. And JFK/LAX.html is that month's results for all JFK to LAX flights. Etc.

As I recall, once I'd worked it out, it took 15 minutes to generate all those files on my Mac laptop, and then a little ftp action got the job done. Worked great, but someone did complain that we were polluting search results with so many pages for LAX, SFO, etc. etc. (SEO, sadly, was not really on our radar.)

That was replaced within a year by a php setup with a proper Oracle backend, and I had to explain to a DB admin what a weighted average was, but that's another story.

Kelly writes:

  The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone. Done well (and why not do it well?) it can become another full-time job. At best it will be a consuming and challenging part-time task that requires ongoing skills.

Bonus true story: I worked for an economic consulting/data/analytical software timesharing firm in the early '80s. They could see that PCs were going to be a huge threat, so they tried to sell "data kits". For instance (and I'm making up the numbers), for $50 you could buy a download of 10 years of GDP data or similar.

Their market logic was: if we just get 1% of the PC market, we'll be rich.

Spoiler: we didn't get 0.1%.

The Washington Post says the police killed 413 unarmed people from 1/1/2015 through 7/16/2021, about 63/year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Kids, a story from the Old Days, c.1981.

DRI (since absorbed into McGraw Hill) had EPS, an advanced economic/financial analysis scripting language, provided via timesharing (mainframes on the East Coast of the USA). I was a customer support programmer in San Francisco the day that they rolled out a powerful arrays feature on the testing mainframe (no clients, but lots of real work going on).

One could put anything as an element inside an array. So I tried:

    X=array(123, "abc")
    Y=Array(X)

    i=loop from 1 to 1000
    x(i+1) = array (xi)

So far, so good, excusable as "clever programmer tests the limits". And then I ran it again.

Same result, plus, 2 minutes later, a call for me from my friend Kevin, who was a lead developer on EPS in DRI HQ: "Chris, what the ^&^&^!@@ are you doing?"

I can choose to see (or not) that the prisoner being walked down the street is shackled. And maybe there are some good reasons for choosing not to see.

But it seems the beginning of sanity for that prisoner, herself, to see her chains.

I'm old enough to have been a timesharing programmer (when a 32k->64k working memory increase seemed like limitless abundance).

The company I worked for offered very expensive timesharing by the hour. Clients used an "Englishy" interpreted language to do economic forecasts, and client staff often programmed their own procedures.

My boss came to me one day to request that I speed up something a client had developed themselves, because it had become too expensive for them to run, and they were ready to bolt.

I had no desire to understand what their code did, and so treated the code mostly like a blackbox, and my job as speeding things up while leaving the transformation of inputs to particular outputs intact.

I had enough experience to know what the low hanging fruit were and went after those in the code. A day's work or so, and we got a 50-90% speed-up, enough to satisfy the client. I still don't really know what the code did. But I enjoyed the effort.

I'll recommend Imago training [1] to any and all couples. It's reflective listening on steroids and was transformational for us.

The basic process starts w/reflective listening, then goes deeper to get at the underlying wound ("when you do that, it brings up all the times my parents..."), then to what might happen in a perfect world ("the toothpaste cap would magically fly back on the tube after 30 seconds of inactivity"), then to some concrete make-ups.

The other things we do that helps is to stick with the current argument (which I find difficult, sometimes) and to not go "meta" ("see, honey, there's a pattern here where you ...").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imago_therapy

My mother's favorite actor, singing a song whose German lyrics include "a ship isn't designed just to lie in the harbor; it needs to sail out to the open sea", and other more scandalous metaphors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqzX-uZUtI4

If I created a Zoom meeting with the trainees, and shared my screen and computer audio running my training video, would I have the same experience?

Phrased in terms of Zoom since I've become oh so familiar with it these past few months. I see the value, since it's probably easier to connect to than a Zoom meeting.

How did the Chinese approach increase "long term risks of reinfection"?

This is part of the reason that it can take so long to comprehend a genuinely innovative new technology: it doesn't win the game that's being played -- it plays a different game entirely.

Yes! Another way to say this: would-be innovators often fail or are delayed because the game they perceive is not the game being played. In aerospace, as you point out, we ought to change the game.

In other situations, say nutrition, we shouldn't (or at least I won't). E.g. Soylent sees the "game" as "get nutrition with minimal muss/fuss", whereas I prefer to see it as "enjoy experimenting with food prep and then consume with friends".

Missing the "game" perspective, the article too much boils down to "people are stupid", and that's not a winning perspective if you're trying to drive technology adoption.

Peter Senge brought your first point to life for me:

The Wright brothers proved that powered flight was possible, but the McDonnel Douglas DC3, introduced in 1935, ushered in the era of commercial air travel. The DC3 was the first plane that supported itself economically as well as aerodynamically....

The DC-3, for the first time, brought together five critical component technologies that formed a successful ensemble. They were: the variable-pitch propeller, retractable landing gear, a type of lightweight molded body construction called “monocque,” a radial air-cooled engine, and wing flaps. To succeed, the DC3 needed all five; four were not enough. One year earlier, the Boeing 247 was introduced with all of them except wing flaps. Boeing’s engineers found that the plane, lacking wing flaps, was unstable on takeoff and landing, and they had to downsize the engine.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/163984/the-fifth-dis...

The scissor effect can't apply to an individual. And I suppose if most everyone falls on one side of the question, even with lots of passion, there's no scissor.

But I'm arguing (SSC may not be) that effective scissor statements create both passion and tunnel vision in people, even one at a time. And so when there are people with passion and tunnel vision on both sides, voilà, scissor. (It's a little bit like "drunken mob". You can't have a mob with just one person, but each person, arguably, gets drunk on their own.)

I'm with you. We see in this discussion that it's difficult even to raise some potential scissors as examples without a lot of commenters falling into them.

SSC's point is not "X is a near-universal scissor", it's that there's a scissor or ten for almost everyone, and that some scissors are likely to ensnare a lot of people.

If you've never found yourself arguing vehemently and extensively, to the death, about something and sometime later wondered what that was about, you may be a counterexample, someone who is scissor-immune.

I sure am not.

"Scissors just are."

I think this is profound. I wrote a few minutes ago that scissors generate passion and tunnel vision, and you've stated that more elegantly.

If you fallen into a scissor, shades of grey don't matter. In particular, the factualness (or not) of the scissor doesn't matter.

Yes, and a lot of commenters are falling into the scissor, metaphorically, arguing that your analogy to the Dreyfuss case is wrong because, damn it, Dreyfuss was {innocent, guilty}.

I think that's in part because, if you're societally oppressed, you're less buffered, so you become understandably hyper-vigilant about what might be used against you. E.g a if you're rich, you may not like a certain tax law change passed out of the Senate committee, but you still have chances to reduce its impact by lobbying for the full Senate vote, the House vote, Presidential veto, IRS implementing regulations, and how your tax attorney goes to bat for you. If you're poor and dependent on certain subsidies which the Senate committee has voted to eliminate, you have fewer points of leverage between you and doom (and "doom" is much worse for you.)

All that said, I think the interesting thing about a scissor statement is that it generates tunnel vision in both sides at the same time that it's generating great passion in both sides. Losing = death, death is imminent, so this is the hill you've got to die on.

But losing is generally not death and complete losing is generally a few more steps away, even if you're on the "oppressed" side I sketched out above.

Consider the Kavanaugh confirmation. I was against it (disclaimer: I'm not personally the target of what he's likely to cause through his votes, so...). But his confirmation is not the last word - a battle not the war. Other Justices will be nominated. Legislation could increase the number of court seats. Grassroots efforts through the states can make Federal decisions less important. He might even be impeached.

And there may be positive consequences in the long term. The spectacle of the hearings may have strengthened long term support for "my side".

If you've fallen into the scissor, you see it as the war, and with no possibility of good consequences to losing.

You also -- just as in the story -- see the other side as a monolith. That works against perceiving their humanity, and it works against good negotiation tactics. Some Senators voted for Kavanaugh enthusiastically; everything about him was good. Some Senators held their noses and voted for him, because they feared their base or like some of Kavanaugh's positions. Some pro-K Senators may even have collected significant IOUs which may become handy later. Not seeing those possibilities leads to myopic strategy.

(And please please please don't fall into the scissor re the Kavanaugh fight if you respond to this comment.)

I worked on a site supporting voter calls in 2004. There was no sanity checking of the usernames people proposed, so we had gems like leading spaces and multiple embedded spaces in the usernames. I figured some people signed up and then were never able to login.

FAA and NTSB have had to deal with this for decades. Aviation safety has steadily improved, because they were, generally, forward-looking. Not so much "who do we blame?" but "what do we do to avoid this in the future?"

Kevin Drum has tracked this in detail. He wrote this in 2018:

"It’s important to emphasize that the lead-crime hypothesis doesn’t claim that lead is solely responsible for crime. It primarily explains only one thing: the huge rise in crime of the 70s and 80s and the equally huge—and completely unexpected—decline in crime of the 90s and aughts."

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...

If you're in/near Washington, DC, come to my wife's class. Free to students, paid for by DC government: http://watercolordc.com/

In the 1980's, the CTO I worked for (indirectly) met with me a couple of times on the high priority project I was leading. The second time, as I left his office, I saw the cover of an IT magazine, featuring the approach (maybe OO programming?) the CTO had just pitched to me, out of the blue.

Terrifying.

My mother came to live with us in the early stages of dementia. She had a laptop and was competent browsing the web, so she stumbled onto a pay-for-your-horoscope site, but fumbled with the credit card payment process.

I ended up blackholing the site via the router, just to be sure. She lost interest later that day.

Cool.

Minibug- as you get to the lower items on the menu, the explanatory help popup moves down as well, and so the help for the items nearer the bottom gets truncated.

https://pasteboard.co/HNi9lq0.png

Erica Chenoweth would agree with you. She's done the research that shows that "start killing people", in many situations, is ineffective.

https://www.ericachenoweth.com/research/wcrw

Were you on the East Coast in August 2011?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/earthquake-dc-e...

The Moth, maybe?

https://themoth.org/about-moth-events

Study from 45 years ago:

Heinz von Foerster’s 1970-1971 experiment at the Biological Computing Laboratory for apprehending the fourth dimension is unique ... combining four dimensional geometry, stereoscopic vision, and joystick manipulation of objects on the screen. ... The fourth dimension was chosen as the knowledge to be acquired because there was no chance that any subjects would have attempted such knowledge before the experiment. By allowing the physical “grasping” of the visual object, where one hand coordinated movement on three axes in the 3rd dimension, while the other similarly controlled three axes of movement in the 4th dimension, subjects were able to intuitively figure out that the strange succession of transforming 3D objects they were seeing (with 3D glasses) were cross-sections of a single 4D object.

http://psychedelicsandlanguage.com/dimensionality/

Disclaimer: I studied with von Foerster years ago, and he'd mentioned this. I only today found this online reference. I want those 4D Toys. Steam, here I come.

Possibly relevant: https://systemswe.love/videos/life-of-an-airline-flight

You might also like

[1] Sharon Drew Morgen's Buying Facilitation

Its message, "buyers don't know how to buy", helps make sense of some of the controversy in this thread. If you're hiring 100 software engineers, god help you if you don't know how to hire. But if you're hiring your first CFO, say, it's more likely that you "don't know how to hire", and that a commanding (yet polite) interviewee will be helpful.

Sharon Drew Morgen emphasizes the process of questioning and the "systemic" nature of the uptake. Again, more relevant for a "big hire" than a dozens per year hire. If you're the first CFO ever hired, especially, it makes sense to help the hiring team think through how the company will adjust to having that new role and whether they've done the necessary groundwork for those adjustments.

[2] The Challenger Sale

Similar, but with an emphasis on the content. Do your research in advance to figure out how your type of widgets solves specific problems that most of your customers have.

The hiring analogue again fits best for "big hires". E.g. "since this is your first CFO, a big part of the job will be to straighten out the ad hoc financial routines that have grown up so far. I have the necessary great financial/accounting skills, but I'm also a great listener/researcher with the people skills to bring people into more constraining routines."

[1] https://buyingfacilitation.com/blog/buying-facilitation-new-...

[2] https://www.cebglobal.com/insights/challenger-sale.html