Lone Gunman

If the elderly are mostly recog­nised and val­ued for their accu­mu­lated knowl­edge and skills (a con­tentious assump­tion in itself, granted), then tech­no­log­i­cal advances are grad­u­ally mak­ing the older gen­er­a­tions redun­dant, sug­gests Philip Greenspun.

Let’s start by con­sid­er­ing fac­tual knowl­edge. An old per­son will know more than a young per­son, but can any per­son, young or old, know as much as Google and Wikipedia? Why would a young per­son ask an elder the answer to a fact ques­tion that can be solved author­i­ta­tively in 10 sec­onds with a Web search?

How about skills? Want help ori­ent­ing a rooftop tele­vi­sion aer­ial? Chang­ing the vac­uum tubes in your TV? Dial­ing up AOL? Using MS-DOS? Chang­ing the rib­bon on an IBM Selec­tric (height of 1961 tech­nol­ogy)? Tun­ing up a car that lacks elec­tronic engine con­trols? Doing your taxes with­out con­sid­er­ing the Alter­na­tive Min­i­mum Tax and the tens of thou­sands of pages of rules that have been added since our senior cit­i­zen was start­ing his career? Didn’t think so.

The same tech­no­log­i­cal progress that enables our soci­ety to keep an ever-larger per­cent­age of old folks’ bod­ies going has simul­ta­ne­ously reduced the value of the minds within those bodies.

Sug­ges­tions for “main­tain­ing rel­e­vance and value in old age” are grate­fully being received on Philip’s post.

You’ve def­i­nitely heard of at least one of them and maybe even laughed, groaned or plain ignored a few oth­ers. To help along that process Tom Chivers presents ten laws of the Inter­net:

• Godwin’s Law “As a Usenet dis­cus­sion grows longer, the prob­a­bil­ity of a com­par­i­son involv­ing Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” […] It is closely related to the log­i­cal fal­lacy reduc­tio ad Hitlerum, which says “Hitler (or the Nazis) liked X, so X is bad”.
• Poe’s Law “With­out a wink­ing smi­ley or other bla­tant dis­play of humour, it is impos­si­ble to cre­ate a par­ody of fun­da­men­tal­ism that some­one won’t mis­take for the real thing.” inverse mean­ing, stat­ing that non-fundamentalists will often mis­take sin­cere expres­sions of fun­da­men­tal­ist beliefs for parody.
• Rule 34 “If it exists, there is porn of it.” See also Rule 35: “If no such porn exists, it will be made.”
• Skitt’s Law “Any post cor­rect­ing an error in another post will con­tain at least one error itself” or “the like­li­hood of an error in a post is directly pro­por­tional to the embar­rass­ment it will cause the poster.”
• Scopie’s Law “In any dis­cus­sion involv­ing sci­ence or med­i­cine, cit­ing Whale.to [a con­spir­acy the­ory site] as a cred­i­ble source loses the argu­ment imme­di­ately, and gets you laughed out of the room.”
• Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law) “If you have to insist that you’ve won an inter­net argu­ment, you’ve prob­a­bly lost badly.”
• Pommer’s Law “A person’s mind can be changed by read­ing infor­ma­tion on the inter­net. The nature of this change will be from hav­ing no opin­ion to hav­ing a wrong opinion.”
• DeMyer’s Zeroth, First, Sec­ond and Third Laws: “Any­one who posts an argu­ment on the inter­net which is largely quo­ta­tions can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argu­ment before it has begun.” (Sec­ond Law)
• Cohen’s Law “Who­ever resorts to the argu­ment that ‘who­ever resorts to the argu­ment that… has auto­mat­i­cally lost the debate’ has auto­mat­i­cally lost the debate.”
• The Law of Excla­ma­tion “The more excla­ma­tion points used in an email (or other post­ing), the more likely it is a com­plete lie. This is also true for exces­sive cap­i­tal letters.”

In the 1950s, Russ­ian sci­en­tist Dmitri Belyaev ran a selec­tive breed­ing project to, by arti­fi­cial selec­tion, breed (incred­i­bly cute) domes­ti­cated sil­ver foxes. The results of this multi-decade exper­i­ment were impres­sive, espe­cially given that the foxes were selected solely for their ami­ca­bil­ity toward humans:

After only forty gen­er­a­tions, the selected foxes began to dis­play changes you (and Dar­win, too) might think would take mil­lions of years to evolve. As expected, they became incred­i­bly friendly toward humans. Whenever they saw peo­ple, they barked, wagged their tails, sniffed the peo­ple, and licked their faces. But even stranger were the phys­i­cal changes, which occurred at a higher fre­quency than in the con­trol group. The ears of the selected foxes became floppy. Their tails turned curly. Their coats lost their cam­ou­flage and became spotty, with a star pat­tern appear­ing on the fore­head. Their skulls became smaller. In short, they looked and behaved remark­ably like their close rel­a­tive the domestic dog.

The above quote comes from an arti­cle by Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare on Edge that looks at why our ances­tors ‘came down from the trees’ and what sep­a­rates us from other hominids, specif­i­cally chim­panzees (hint: it’s not the the­ory of mind, but tol­er­ance and cooperation).

So what we have are chimps who coop­er­ate but aren’t very tol­er­ant, and bono­bos who are very tol­er­ant but don’t really coop­er­ate in the wild. What prob­a­bly hap­pened six mil­lion years ago, when hominids split from the ances­tor we share with chim­panzees and bono­bos, is that we became very tol­er­ant, and this allowed us to coop­er­ate in entirely new ways. With­out this height­ened tol­er­ance, we would not be the species we are today.

In one of my very first posts, I wrote about an arti­cle that noted how “money will make you hap­pier, up to a point. After that, it makes no dif­fer­ence. That point is the won­der­fully quan­ti­ta­tive ‘point of com­fort’.

That is, once we have enough money to feed, clothe and house our­selves, extra money makes lit­tle impact to our hap­pi­ness. Or does it?

Recent research look­ing at this phe­nom­e­non is start­ing to sug­gest that more money can indeed buy hap­pi­ness, but we’re just not very good at doing so.

[Researchers] are begin­ning to offer an intrigu­ing expla­na­tion for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The prob­lem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psy­cho­log­i­cal rea­sons, when it comes to spend­ing money, we tend to value goods over expe­ri­ences, our­selves over oth­ers, things over peo­ple. When it comes to hap­pi­ness, none of these deci­sions are right: The spend­ing that make us happy, it turns out, is often spend­ing where the money van­ishes and leaves some­thing inef­fa­ble in its place.

As Jonah Lehrer puts it, “Instead of buy­ing things, we should buy mem­o­ries”. But why? Lehrer continues:

Why don’t things make us happy? The answer, I think, has to do with a fun­da­men­tal fea­ture of neu­rons: habit­u­a­tion. When sen­sory cells are exposed to the same stim­u­lus over and over again, they quickly get bored and stop firing.

This memories-over-objects the­ory seems to tie-in quite nicely with these pre­vi­ous find­ings.

A net­work effect is “the effect that one user of a good or ser­vice has on the value of that prod­uct to other peo­ple”. When there is a pos­i­tive net­work effect we say that the good or ser­vice in ques­tion increases in use­ful­ness the more users there are, like the tele­phone or online social networks.

Of course, being in a busi­ness or sec­tor that relies on pos­i­tive net­work exter­nal­i­ties brings with it one inher­ent prob­lem: get­ting to the socio­dy­namic crit­i­cal mass. Chris Dixon looks at six strate­gies for over­com­ing strong net­work effects; the so-called “chicken and egg” prob­lems.

• Sig­nal long-term com­mit­ment to plat­form suc­cess and com­pet­i­tive pric­ing: Microsoft’s $500m pro­mo­tion of the xbox platform.
• Use back­wards and side­ways com­pat­i­bil­ity to ben­e­fit from exist­ing com­ple­ments: Microsoft with DOS and Win­dows ver­sions, Apple with Bootcamp.
• Exploit irreg­u­lar net­work topolo­gies: (Early) Face­book and JDate for social net­work­ing and dat­ing respectively.
• Influ­ence the firms that pro­duce vital com­ple­ments: Sony and Philips influ­enc­ing Poly­gram for their CDs.
• Pro­vide stand­alone value for the base prod­uct: Record­ing of tele­vi­sion on VCRs.
• Inte­grate ver­ti­cally into crit­i­cal com­ple­ments when sup­ply is not cer­tain: Nintendo’s games con­soles with games funded by Microsoft and Sony.

via Ben Cas­nocha