Dr. Virginia Satir, and the Gap between Stimulus and Response

Last night, this morning, thinking about the way Dr. Virginia Satir broke down the gap between stimulus and response, and thought about how that related to the pace of change in a life.

1. Sensory
2. Meaning/Representation
3. Feeling
4. Feeling about Feeling
5. Self-Defense (if perceive threat to self)
6. Rules for Response
7. Response action

Breaking it down like this, you can see the opportunities for effecting a change in your life, going from one set of likely behaviors and responses (remember, emotions, impulses, transitory thoughts can also be stimulus, doesn't have to be strictly external), to another set of likely behaviors and responses. Each is an opportunity to make a change, because of the strictly linear flow from one to the next. (not talking about: changing your environment (even your inner metal environment), which changes the set of likely stimulus, which is another way to effect a change) The difficulty is that these steps happen so fast, they are practically hard-wired in the brain. It can take close to a decade (with consistent hard work and evaluation) to change some of these. That has been my experience. It is nice to have it broken down, anyway, so you can see the possible routes of attack to make a positive change.

Paying the price for your desired goals

If you want something, you have to pay the price. Your objective evidence of paying the price shows how much you really want something. (Not really...) You can work on your ability to have your desire for a goal, and your objective evidence of "paying the price", be congruent. Less congruent now, more congruent later, with time and effort. This goes in line with the concept of some "hardwired" things in the mind, taking 10 years to change. I am on a 10 year project to have my objective evidence of "paying the price" be congruent with my stated desire for different goals, outcomes, values, etc.

Components of Compensation and Management

Thinking more last night about components of compensation and management (and motivation). There is Intrinsic and External motivation. You need a mixture of both. Men are judged by their salary compared to their brother-in-law, but, also, money alone cannot effectively motivate. A healthy percentage of motivation has to be intrinsic (the problem with intrinsic motivation is that it can be irreparably damaged by a violation of trust (I will write more about this some other time). (How the heck does Intrinsic and External motivation relate to below? Beat me. Still puzzling it out.) Anyway, I remembered that I should add "Market Forces" to the compensation and management factors. Exact components of compensation and management you would desire.

1. Historical evidence of meeting objectives: like bookings of a salesman
2. Data on activities that have a "causal" relationship to the desired objectives: like number of meetings and follow-up activities with decision makers
3. Data on activities that have a presumed, perhaps tenuous causal relationship to the desired objectives: like hours spent researching a possible new product offering. There is a significant chance of complete failure with a new product offering - that is why the causal relationship to the desired objectives is tenuous.
4. "Positive" human factors: I sometimes eat at a cafeteria salad restaurant. The cafeteria trays are handed out by a handicapped man. Part of his salary is due to the restaurant living its stated values. (But it isn't all "altruism", he brings value, he is the voice of the restaurant's handicapped patrons). Note - What isn't a "positive" human factor - keeping someone in a job because you feel sorry for them is not a "positive" human factor - it has everything to do with a manager who finds it easy to be generous with other peoples' money, who cannot deal with the anxiety of terminating someone for cause, and who would not hesitate to terminate that person during an economic downturn, which is the exact time they would find it hardest to find a new job.
5. "Negative" human factors: the percentage of salary that is based on kissing up, is another example.
6. Market Forces: if the work is directly or closely aligned with pricing in an economic market, a component of compensation/management should be based on the market price: like a "free-agent" in baseball, or upper management in a publicly traded company, some component of compensation/management has to be based on the market price

Friendship, Trust, Interest, and Reciprocity

Very interesting post from Moshe Z: What is Friendship?

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Basically on how Friendship, Trust, Shared-Interest, Entertainment-Value cannot be conflated, and, even considered separately, are not always reciprocal. (But does that in fact cover the whole range of positive relationships in social networking? Maybe we get a pretty good model if we also add that people wear different "hats": hobbyist, professional, political, fan, activist, ...)

Dr. Deming, and the Folly of "Management by Objectives"

Dr. Deming takes a dim view of Management by Objectives. And he has a point. It seems logical to emphasize the meeting of objectives, but managing by them has difficulties. Your objective evidence of meeting objectives is historical data, so you end up "managing" much like if you painted your car's windshield black, and drove simply from the view in your rear-view mirror. You would be able to make progress, slowly and with many fender scrapes, but it would hardly be satisfactory. You need to have some kind of "forward-looking" metrics. Now, any "forward-looking" metrics will carry some risk, perhaps a great deal of risk. Imagine a windshield heavily smeared with Vaseline; you would lose all depth perception because all objects would image as smeared, flat blobs of color. But you would do better than driving with the rear-view mirror alone. "Forward-looking" metrics are based on some model of causality, based on incomplete knowledge and a simplified model of the world. It may not be any better than "viewing through a Vaseline smeared sheet of glass". But how much more satisfactory than managing by historical data alone. So last night I thought about what the exact components of compensation and management you would desire.

1. Historical evidence of meeting objectives: like bookings of a salesman
2. Data on activities that have a "causal" relationship to the desired objectives: like number of meetings and follow-up activities with decision makers
3. Data on activities that have a presumed, perhaps tenuous causal relationship to the desired objectives: like hours spent researching a possible new product offering. There is a significant chance of complete failure with a new product offering - that is why the causal relationship to the desired objectives is tenuous.
4. "Positive" human factors: I sometimes eat at a cafeteria salad restaurant. The cafeteria trays are handed out by a handicapped man. Part of his salary is due to the restaurant living its stated values. (But it isn't all "altruism", he brings value, he is the voice of the restaurant's handicapped patrons). Note - What isn't a "positive" human factor - keeping someone in a job because you feel sorry for them is not a "positive" human factor - it has everything to do with a manager who finds it easy to be generous with other peoples' money, who cannot deal with the anxiety of terminating someone for cause, and who would not hesitate to terminate that person during an economic downturn, which is the exact time they would find it hardest to find a new job.
5. "Negative" human factors: the percentage of salary that is based on kissing up, is another example.

New Zealand

Among these cities,

• London
• Paris
• New York
• The Capital Place of New Zealand (*)
  

which has the highest density of sheep with human faces and hands? The answer will surprise you! (No it won't)

(*) New Zealanders have not yet invented the idea of giving places names. To signify different places in their country, they hold up a different number of sheep with human faces and hands, until their arms get tired. Trüe Story!

Women get Upset

Women enjoy being unhappy. However, if you are a man and suffering from the symptoms of Asperger's Disorder, you can be cured of most of the pathologies by having a shrill female threatening you with removal of your face and eyelids, for the tiniest infraction. Frankly, I was, in my youth, unhealthily detached from the outside world. Now, that world, in the person of a Small-Form-Factor Female-Type, abuses me into awareness. To my eternal gratitude. (I have been so sarcastic, so long, that even I forget exactly when I am being completely sincere. A risk of sarcasm.)

Un-subscribing to "Overcoming Bias"

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Un-subscribing to "Overcoming Bias". What drove me over the edge was Robin Hanson's agreeing with the "Darwinism"-Nazi link pushed by "Expelled: No Ferris Bueller Allowed", starring Ben Stein. But it was a gradual slide down in quality, and a greater realization what a tiny contribution "Overcoming Bias" was going to have in fulfilling my personal goals and aspirations. What is "Overcoming Bias"? I cannot see it as more than Libertarians and Trans-humanists joining together to help each other in the "Art of Controversy". The point is: we don't want Rationality, we want Human Effectiveness. If there was some way to achieve your highest held goals, requiring you to dispense with all Rationality, dispense with Rationality you should. Imagine a malicious God, omniscient and omnipotent, causing you to stub your toe, or suffer other indignities, every time you attempted a Rational analysis. All evidence suggests that Rationality is a large component of Human Effectiveness. But it is not the whole thing. Like the parable of the two frogs in a bucket of cream. Both are swimming furiously to keep atop and keep from drowning. The first frog surveys the situation, realizes that his swimming will give out eventually, realizes that drowning is inevitable, and gives up and sinks to the bottom to die. The second frog, an irrational optimist, keeps swimming furiously, keeps swimming, keeps, swimming, the cream turns to butter, and the frog is able to hop on top, and hop out of the bucket. Which frog was Rational? Which frog was Effective? You can conflate the two (if it makes you happy to do so), but the distinction remains in reality. OK, we have Human Effectiveness and Rationality. Rationality is a large component of Human Effectiveness. What are the failure modes of Rationality, as practiced by humans or groups of humans? Well, there are a lot. Consider the list of logical fallacies. Consider the examples in the book Predictably Irrational. Consider Robert Cialdini's study of human influence, beneficial and malevolent. Each failure mode has the potential to deprive you of successfully achieving your goals and aspirations.

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So, I don't see the point of studying "bias" outside of the context of:

• a human identifying what they believe to be their highest goals and aspirations

• a human having to accomplish this goals and aspirations with limited resources; the most important of which are time, energy, attention, focus.

• with goals and aspirations identified, and limited resources acknowledged, the human can now proceed acting like a stakeholder: observation of situation; leading to analysis; leading to identifying choices; leading to decision; leading to action; leading to evaluating effectiveness; leading back to observation.

• critical analysis of the soundness and ranking of the goals and aspirations identified earlier. Were some chosen simply from social pressure? Are some simply impossible? Are some harmful?

• We expect goals and aspirations to augmented, to be tossed out, to be raised or lowered in relative importance.

Without this context, judging the value of anything claiming to be "Rationality" is pointless. Is it a tool for helping human achieve goals and aspirations? Does it work? And this is where "Overcoming Bias" leaves me cold. There is absolutely no interest in integrating these tools of rationality into a framework of human achievement of goals and aspirations. But the tools of the art of controversy are constantly leaped to, when there is a chance of harming the relative standing of Libertarianism or Trans-Humanism in the world of ideas and notoriety. It happens too often for an observer to miss it. So, I gain little for the cost of my limited attention.

Firefox, Eclipse - User Defined Spell Check Dictionaries

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Want to add words to Firefox's text-box spell-checker? On my Windows 2K Pro it is located at: C:\Documents and Settings\MANUEL_G\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\6qcueeru.default\persdict.dat (What the hell is "6qcreeru"? Is my own computer calling me "6queen queer"? OUTRAGE!) So the wonderfulness starts with "persdict.dat" I have it as a "Favorite" in UltraEdit, so I can add words at will. UltraEdit has a very large dictionary, so it is a fine way to double check the spelling before adding the word (and to verify I didn't accidentally add a misspelling to Firefox's spell-checker). (((

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Spell-checker for Eclipse? Glad you asked! Set the file at: Window | Preferences... | General | Editors | Text Editors | Spelling | Dictionaries | User defined dictionary (Whew!) )))

HTML prettyprint, cont.

Came to realization that I am trying to anticipate browser failures from lack of whitespace, but I would know nothing about it until I start rendering a few dozen pages programmatically. So skip the whitespace tom-foolery. Trim all the whitespace, normalize all to spaces, just use "textwrap" to wrap nicely. The idea, since the general algorithm has the potential to be exponential, is to use heuristics at the tips of the branches and the base of the tree, then clean up. Then use recursive algorithm, but with checks before descending if a computation is deemed to be "likely expensive". Going to add "minimum_total_charlength", because easy to calculate. Why did I forget to clean "tail" along with "text"?

more work on HTML prettyprint

today did not have chance to work on HTML pretty print was going to first lay out all the "text" and "tail" in a line seperated by the "whitespace preserving" tags

text tail text tail text text <whitespace preserving> text tail <whitespace preserving> text tail

then we have the: 1) empties 2) only whitespace 3) printing characters 4) printing characters with some whitespace at ends we only care about the whitespace that seperates printing characters, for the most part, printing characters in the "text" and seperating whitespace in the immediately following "tail" might be too much work, but, I would not be surprised if ran into issue later (all this work is not in vain, also I will need such stuff when I start programmically generating Python code, to compare my Python bytecode generation against Python's own, against the same algorithm, because of the work I am planning to do with AST, either Python's own in 2.6, or my own form)

Cats and Coffee

I do not endorse placing cats into giant cups of coffee. I think that is so wrong. It is an impractical way to flavor-enhance, and it aggravates the cat, usually. This particular cat seems to enjoy coffee immersion.

Contact Lenses

ideas for pretty print HTML/XML

Now, over the weekend, I was thinking about pretty printing HTML/XML I figgered, armed with the desired right margin first find the "elements" that definitely need "breaking up" into multiple lines start in the "deepest" part of the tree, why not make it simple these are all the different ways can print element

1) <tag>tagtext</tag>tail

2) <tag>tagtext</tag>
   tail
  
3) <tag>
     tagtext
   </tag>
  
4) <tag>
   tagtext
   </tag>
  
5) text<markup>moretext</markup>texttext

6) <tag1><tag2>tagtext</tag2></tag1>

hmm...

Indian Wedding, Western Perspective

My thoughts on Indian Weddings, having endured one (slightly Westernized, only took 2 hours). My sunburn was delicious.

Lisp and the Day Zero Problem

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When a programmer finally gets his head around "code is data", it is best to call that day "Day Zero" and move on from there. The problem with the Lisp boys is they get stuck there -- they never make it past "Day Zero", and they never get around to coding programs to provide human value.

Bubbles vs. Non-Bubbles: science of prognostication

Bubbles vs. Non-Bubbles Thought experiment: imagine you had a magical device, hooked up to a klaxon, that rang out before the market bubble burst. But, when it rang, you didn't know if the bubble would burst in 5 seconds, or in 3 months. It had some randomizer inside, and you didn't have access to know the setting. There are some unknown number of such devices held by other investors. Maybe a dozen, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands. Each has a reason to keep the existence of their ownership of the device a secret. You are waken at 3 A.M., by a terrible ringing. What do you do? Every second you wait, after the klaxon rings, before the bubble actually bursts, you are making money. How long after the klaxon rings, do you pull the trigger? The point is, even with this magical device, there would be a temptation to procrastinate on selling your whole position, there would be a temptation to try to time the market to the second. Somebody, in possession of this wonderful device, will get caught with their pants down. How the hell will this supposed science of bubble prognostication be any better than this magical device? It can only be worse, with worst results.

"Empty" tags in HTML

These are the "empty" tags in HTML: area, base, basefont, br, col, frame, hr, img, input, isindex, link, meta, param ...sometimes p important if you are outputting HTML from an XML dom

Overcoming shortfalls in Pownce

Pownce is good pownce.com/manuelg but search is terribly lacking in search capability. Until they fix that, I will have to put some notes here.