Lone Gunman

When requested to give up a “sacred value”, the inclu­sion of a finan­cial incen­tive incites moral out­rage, decreases gen­eral sup­port for a com­pro­mise, increases anger and increases a subject’s approval of “vio­lent opposition”.

Research look­ing at our reac­tions to such pro­pos­als offers same sug­ges­tions for nego­ti­at­ing over sacred val­ues.

A more suc­cess­ful tack for nego­ti­at­ing over sacred val­ues, as it turns out, is to sim­ply use the right words. Whether dis­cussing nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment or reluc­tance to sell one’s lucky mug at a garage sale, using spe­cific rhetor­i­cal strate­gies can make trade-offs seem less taboo and can facil­i­tate con­flict res­o­lu­tion. […] One tac­tic is to describe trade­offs in terms of “costs and ben­e­fits” and “analy­sis” rather than in terms of sacred val­ues and money. This vague util­i­tar­ian lan­guage appears to mask the emotion-laden taboo nature of the exchange. Another strat­egy is to empha­size the dire, oblig­a­tory nature of the trade-off. For exam­ple, peo­ple are more will­ing to sell their body organs for med­ical trans­plants when told it is the only way to save lives because this fram­ing posits the exchange as one sacred value for another. In an age where many of the most volatile con­flicts stem from sacred causes, and politi­cians have ques­tioned effec­tive­ness of diplo­macy, under­stand­ing how to best nego­ti­ate about these issues has never been more critical.

via Schneier on Security

Now that Joel Spol­sky has ‘retired’ from blog­ging at Joel on Soft­ware (in the for­mat the site has been known for, at least), Jan Willem Boer is read­ing the entire back-catalogue of entries and con­dens­ing the knowl­edge within each essay into a sin­gle sen­tence (or two).

The result is a stun­ning list of tips on run­ning a small busi­ness, pro­gram­ming best prac­tices, pro­duc­tiv­ity tips, tech­ni­cal hir­ing prac­tices and entrepreneurship.

The series:

• Part 1 (2000)
• Part 2 (2001)
• Part 3 (2002)
• Part 4 (2003)
• Part 5 (2004)
• Part 6 (2005)
• Part 7 (2006)
• Part 8 (2007)
• Part 9 (2008)
• Part 10 (2009)
• Part 11 (2010)

In a study prob­ing the asso­ci­a­tion between ‘tech­no­log­i­cal afflu­ence’ and gen­eral well-being it was found that com­put­ers, mobile phones and music play­ers increased self-reported lev­els of hap­pi­ness, while tele­vi­sion own­er­ship decreased it.

That is: the own­er­ship of most mod­ern tech­no­log­i­cal goods makes us happy, except for tele­vi­sions, which make us sad.

Using self-reported life sat­is­fac­tion as a mea­sure of sub­jec­tive well-being we find that a fixed phone, a mobile phone, a com­pact disk player, a com­puter and an Inter­net con­nec­tion are all asso­ci­ated with higher lev­els of well-being, whereas tele­vi­sion sets are asso­ci­ated with lower lev­els. We fur­ther pro­vide evi­dence sug­gest­ing that the level of mobile and broad­band pen­e­tra­tion mat­ters for life sat­is­fac­tion as well. Our esti­mates indi­cate that, at a min­i­mum, an indi­vid­ual requires a 10% increase in GDP per capita as com­pen­sa­tion to [cease] hold­ing these prod­ucts. Fur­ther impli­ca­tions sug­gest that increas­ing mobile pen­e­tra­tion by 10% has lim­ited effects on implied GDP per capita, con­trary to a sim­i­lar increase in broad­band penetration.

via Tim Har­ford

To ensure that extremely com­plex tasks–tasks too com­plex even for “super-specialists”–are per­formed effec­tively, accu­rately and with min­i­mal mis­takes, check­lists are an invalu­able tool, sug­gested Atul Gawande in a 2007 arti­cle in The New Yorker (and every­where else since, it seems).

Gawande illus­trates (in an inor­di­nate amount of detail) how seem­ingly unnec­es­sary check­lists can make huge dif­fer­ences to our effec­tive­ness in com­plet­ing the most com­plex (and sim­ple) of tasks by look­ing at how Peter Pronovost dra­mat­i­cally reduced infec­tion rates (from 11% to 0% in some cases*) in hos­pi­tals through­out America.

So how do you actu­ally man­age [immense] com­plex­ity? The solu­tion that the med­ical pro­fes­sion has favored is specialization. […]

We now live in the era of the super-specialist—of clin­i­cians who have taken the time to prac­tice at one nar­row thing until they can do it bet­ter than any­one who hasn’t. Super-specialists have two advan­tages over ordi­nary spe­cial­ists: greater knowl­edge of the details that mat­ter and an abil­ity to han­dle the com­plex­i­ties of the job. [But] what do you do when exper­tise is not enough? […]

It’s far from obvi­ous that some­thing as sim­ple as a check­list could be of much help in med­ical care. […] Map­ping out the proper steps for each [patient] is not pos­si­ble, and physi­cians have been skep­ti­cal that a piece of paper with a bunch of lit­tle boxes would improve mat­ters much.

In 2001, though, a critical-care spe­cial­ist at Johns Hop­kins Hos­pi­tal named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. […]

The check­lists pro­vided two main ben­e­fits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with mem­ory recall, espe­cially with mun­dane mat­ters that are eas­ily over­looked in patients under­go­ing more dras­tic events. […] A sec­ond effect was to make explicit the min­i­mum, expected steps in com­plex processes.

Gawande notes how Pronovost enabled the wide­spread use of check­lists by per­suad­ing hos­pi­tal man­age­ment to actively encour­age and take the side of those lower down in the pro­fes­sional hier­ar­chy (i.e. nurses) to chal­lenge those above them (i.e. con­sul­tants) with­out recriminations.

via @zambonini

*The check­list used was extremely sim­ple and con­tained only five steps. It was so sim­ple that it was resisted by almost every employee. With the check­list actu­ally being con­sulted read­ily, it turned out that at least one step was either missed or not imple­mented cor­rectly in many cases.

In light of recent sug­ges­tions of tech­ni­cal faults and the ensu­ing recall of a num­ber of mod­els from Toyota’s line, Robert Wright looks at why we should not worry about dri­ving mod­ern cars.

The rea­sons: the increased risks are neg­li­gi­ble, the sys­tems that fail undoubt­edly save more lives than not, this is the nature of car ‘testing’.

Our cars are, increas­ingly, software-driven — that is, they’re doing more and more of the driving.

And soft­ware, as the peo­ple at Microsoft or Apple can tell you, is full of sur­prises. It’s pretty much impos­si­ble to antic­i­pate all the bugs in a com­plex com­puter pro­gram. Hence the reliance on beta testing. […]

Now, “beta test­ing” sounds creepy when the process by which testers uncover bugs can involve death. But there are two rea­sons not to start bemoan­ing the brave new world we’re entering.

First, even back before cars were software-driven, beta test­ing was com­mon. Any car is a sys­tem too com­plex for design­ers to fully antic­i­pate the upshot for life and limb. Hence decades of non-microchip-related safety recalls.

Sec­ond, the fact that a fea­ture of a car can be fatal isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a per­sua­sive objec­tion to it. […]

Sim­i­larly, those soft­ware fea­tures that are sure to have unan­tic­i­pated bugs, includ­ing fatal ones, have upsides. Elec­tronic sta­bil­ity con­trol keeps cars from flip­ping over, and elec­tronic throt­tle con­trol improves mileage.