While not nearly as important, the idea that authors are real makes me immediately relate to my own experience that customers don't seem to understand that software is made by real people too. People with feelings, who are fallible. Several comments on blogs or reviews on the app store show to me that people don't feel they are being insulting or rude if they aren't facing the person they criticize. The more I wrote this comment the more I started to seem the Internet as a whole falling victim to anonymous words that cut deep. We've had to develop unnaturally thick skin.
Even as a developer of software, I've at times found myself forgetting that software is written by real people.
Just a few months ago, I bought an app from the Mac App Store. I became disenamored with the app due to a glaring fault. I regained consciousness about halfway through writing my negative review on the App Store (that'll be my excuse for getting as far as I did), with the thought, "Why don't I first email this guy and see if he'll fix it before writing this review?" So, I closed the review form and opened an email. Sure enough, he responded within the hour, and a new release came out the next week with my suggestion built in.
My next email to him was explaining why he should raise the price of his app. He was a real person.
I can't understand this logic. Did he think the internet was some magical place that created all his games and apps and so on?
How did he think about manufacturing then? Or artwork? Or movies?
How does someone get so far in such a technology based society without knowing that there are people behind all these things?
In my experience there is a large class of people who lack basic curiosity about how things work. They are content to believe that things just "exist". I haven't done much research into this, but I would be interested in seeing if this is considered more an education problem, or if some people simply don't have the capacity for curiosity.
Yes, I've noticed this as well. Growing up as a kid I was always interested in how things worked. Luckily my dad was an engineer and was more than happy to answer all my questions. In university I was also surrounded by people who were fascinated by how things worked. Because of that I'm still very surprised when I meet people who show no such interest. That said, I now know quite a few people who fall in that category. They're all very smart people, with good educations, but they're just okay with the fact that things exist.
The dangerous thing about this attitude though is that these people often underestimate what it takes for something to be created. You see this when politicians are eager to cut on education or when someone looks for a programmer to 'quickly implement their briliant new app'. Note that these people aren't necessarily dumb, but they've just never thought about what it takes for things to be built or designed.
I have a friend who is a teacher, she had to explain to her class that no, they did not have mobile phones during the Great Fire of London, no, not even "bricks". Some of the class didn't believe her.
There are people involved in the manufacturing of Oreos and iPods and office cubicles, but if you compare it with shopping at a farmer's market or a craft fair and meeting the person who made the thing you are buying, it can all seem so abstract and distant.
Someone might rail against "all the preprocessed crap" that you can buy in a grocery store (and people do, all the time), with only the barest awareness that there are people involved in making those products, too. To people who are not software developers and don't know software developers, things like Google Search and Facebook and Microsoft Office might seem like they similarly spring up from within the bowels of huge companies, never really fully owned by any human who touches them, until they are released onto our computers as more cold, inhuman artifacts of the modern world.
Surely we here all know about the people behind the software, but most of us still don't think about the people behind the Oreos.
There is, or used to be, some show on I think the History Channel about how a lot of these processed foods are made. It was fascinating and disgusting in equal measures.
I think the real difference is that in one case you have someone watching a puree of HFCS, artificial thickeners, and almost-real-food slide down an assembly line following directions with little room for personal initiative, and in the other case you have people painstakingly writing code line by line, having to think carefully about each of them. There are a lot of people involved in manufacturing, but there isn't much thought and care compared to individual craftsmanship.
It's much cheaper to manufacture copies of software than it is to manufacture copies of oreos. It might make more sense comparing the individual who painstakingly crafts each line of code to the individual who painstakingly crafts each line of the recipe, the fabrication process, the machines that cook the oreos, and so on.
Did he think that software was somewhat generated automatically by some machine? Or was it just that he had no idea how to write a program in the same way that I have no idea how to build a particle accelerator but appreciate that someone must.
David Foster Wallace's take on this was that my own reality is so overpoweringly real, that it's hard to see you (or anyone else) as real.
everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive.... Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real....
The remedy he proposed:
[Instead:] if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider.
While I agree with your suggestion for dealing with Customer Service, I don't agree with Mr. Wallace's proposed remedy. Why should I have to imagine someone in a piteous position in order to be able to empathize with them? Can't we just accept people for who they are and empathize because they are just like us?
You might as well ask, "why can't we just make ourselves smarter?" Our brains don't always work in the way we want them to work; what's wrong with proposing a brain hack that results in a desired emotional output?
Wallace's hack is particularly cool because it uses the prefrontal cortex (over which you have at least some level of conscious control) to create stories that trick your limbic brain into generating the preferred emotional response.
I've seen this referred to as "riding an elephant", because the "rider" (the conscious mind) can skillfully manipulate the "elephant" (the bulk of the brain), but ultimately remains at the larger creature's mercy. Great image.
Thanks for that explanation. I've seen the "riding the elephant" analogy before and it's quite fitting. Usually the rider can't do much, but this trick seems to work.
I do something similar when I see a crazy driver in traffic... I imagine that he or she might be on their way to an emergency room to care for a loved one (or is perhaps a doctor). I try to feel sorry for them for being in a position where they are trying to hurry.
I actually read to do this in some silly self-help book (Don't Sweat The Small Stuff, perhaps?) years ago. It's helped a lot.
When I see someone in a hurry I usually give them the same kind of pass.
Really, we've all been there. In an absolute hurry. I don't necessarily imagine them in a scenario where the hurried pace is necessary; I just know that in the moment things feel far more urgent than they need to.
I think it's been answered pretty well by other people here w.r.t. the mixed reputation of self-help books, with a side of embarrassment for admitting I read one (which is really nothing to be embarrassed about).
Because a lot of them are pure nonsense that can do more harm than good. There's a weird mish-mash of useful and garbage, and it's hard to tell which is which unless you already know about the field.
Some of them lack science. Worse, some of them are actively anti-science.
I agree that there some great books, with useful helpful life-changing advice.
It is amazing how much that kind of thinking can help. Especially since I have tried to adopt considering the persons situation before getting mad at them, when I see myself or others getting mad at somebody and accusing them of something, when they are in the (car|line) (next to|behind) us.., it makes me ashamed to realize 1) I'm being just as much, if not more of a jerk, and 2) maybe they aren't actually being a jerk at all...
This is an interesting take that I had not expected to read when going to this comments section, but you're absolutely right. But this applies to almost everything. Every time I read a report of a sanctioned (non-criminal) or poorly evaluated public school teacher, I think of my friends who are teachers: how they've had to juggle everything in their personal lives in addition to the emotional and physical drain that comes from being passionate about teaching children, especially if the school's administration is terrible.
After that, it's harder to judge the teacher in question, knowing that there could've been any number of strains that led to a troublesome incident or poor performance report.
It doesn't, but think about it from their perspective. Do you base performance on number of A's given? On scoring on standardized tests that only show how well you taught students to take tests? Where do you include "opening a student's eyes to the power of reason and science" or "planting a seed of a deep love for literature" or even just "being a person a student wants to be like"?
It isn't much different than how've question of how to evaluate coders. Any mechanism that can be easily proscribed can be easily gamed or is meaningless. Any mechanism that truly measures worth is extremely complex, doesn't scale, and may have issues with labor laws.
I wouldn't want that crap legislated by state legislatures, either.
It's more than that though. One problem a lot of people have with regard to software is that they think it is trivial work. As though it requires merely "doing it right", as though it's a matter of just assembling widgets into something else in a straightforward manner. An analogy would be, say, a fast food cashier. All it takes is punching the buttons for the desired options, right? Creating software is the same sort of thing just with slightly more complicated options, right? They don't appreciate that it's a complicated creative endeavor that requires inventiveness and trade-offs and architecting and artistry.
I think this might be one reason why Apple's products are perceived differently, because the aesthetics are more apparent and that clues people into some aspect of the complexity behind the software.
There's a book that describes the effect in war. The basic premise is that it's easier to kill people by dropping a bomb on them from an airplane than it is to shoot them with a rifle on the battlefield.
It's because in the latter you see your victim. And immediately relate to that victim [edit: 1]. Which makes shooting him or her exceedingly difficult.
It's an interesting parallel.
The book is called On Killing, by US Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.
Nitpick: You mean "psychopathic", not "psychotic". People with a psychotic illness are more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence, and are much more likely to harm themselves than to harm another person.
"Psychotic" also works here, but for a different reason. While a psychopath may be able to perceive, but unable to empathize with, a person, someone in the depths of psychotic delusion may be unable to perceive a fellow human being. It is perhaps not nearly as common "in the wild", but it does occur (the killing of Tim McLean by Vince Weiguang Li being the example that comes most easily to mind). In fact, generating a sort of "target psychosis" has been the aim of most modern infantry training for some time, since teaching people to see, recognize and react to targets is an awful lot easier than training them to kill humans, even under severe threat. (Human-shaped targets were introduced to training after it was discovered that most infanteers never actually fired an aimed shot at an opponent in either of the World Wars.) Similarly, you can sniff war on the horizon when the machinery used to dehumanize the enemy is started up.
I read somewhere (citation needed!) that the percentage of soldiers who deliberately fire their weapon at the enemy has increased from WWI to the Iraq conflict, which some put down to violence in movies and video games. After watching excellent Iraqi conflict documentaries like Restrepo and Armadillo (Danish movie) and seeing how soldiers react to conflict, there could be merit to that argument.
You're right about the percentage increase. This is for two reasons - first, because most of the close-range shooting on the ground was done by special forces who're trainined to overcome that resistance. Second, because many of the deaths are from bombs - either shelling from ships at sea, or from aircraft and UAVs. Those last three remove the personal element, and that makes "pushing the button" really easy and guilt-free. We as humans who pride ourselves on empathy can be pretty savage :-(
I could be mis-remembering the article in question, but I think the percentage increase referred to soldiers who fired their weapon (e.g. assault rifle or sidearm) directly at an enemy they could see - meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time.
I also recall that snipers are trained by shooting watermelons - the impact of a high velocity round on a watermelon is not too dissimilar to an impact on a human head. Snipers see the carnage in all its gory detail because of their magnified scope so it's necessary to desensitise them in training.
> meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time.
And yet the rate of violent crime continues to go down, bear-baiting and dogfights have gone from national pass-times to illegal aberrations, and dueling is pretty much extinct.
The best lesson I have learned after dealing with lots of frustrated users is that their initial contact is more like how you'd interact with an inanimate object than a human. If someone yells at me personally, it seems a bit unreasonable... but if someone gets frustrated using my product and "virtually" throws it on the ground and stomps on it, that is a feeling I can understand. Once they have that off their chest, and I respond in a reasonable way, the follow-up conversation is always more respectful and humane. Just need to figure out how to read that initial communication and understand that they aren't mad at you, they are just frustrated with your product. Also, don't take it so personally that you miss out on the valuable bug report (or ux critique) that is so often embedded in these messages.
It’s not anonymity, exactly, but (for want of a better term) noncorporeality. We all know plenty of people whose online personae are bold and crass, even though they write under their real name. In person, we’re wired to observe certain social niceties to fulfill, I don’t know, some innate sense of tribal duty. It’s a whole lot more difficult to shout at a man than at his words on a page. Bodilessness is dehumanising—for good and ill.
The color of the envelope does not change the message it contains. The only difference between what I write to you online and what I would say to you in person is one of detail and quality, as I have more opportunity online to compose. The problem of rudeness and insults is not due to any inherent flaw of the Internet itself, but rather due to the fact that most children aren't taught that anonymity, although a necessity, is not for the purpose of becoming unaccountable.
"Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority ... It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation -- and their ideas from suppression -- at the hand of an intolerant society."
> The color of the envelope does not change the message it contains.
I would consider this half-true. As Marshall McLuhan said: "the medium is the message". What is communicated is defined by the complete sum of the experience of the receiver, which includes subtle nuances of how that message is packaged.
