Seth Godin writes:

I think there’s a huge gap between what people are willing to pay for nice (a lot) and what it would cost businesses to deliver it (almost nothing). Smells like an opportunity.”

In Canada, there’s two major airlines that serve most of the country: Air Canada and WestJet. It’s a common theme to hear people prefer WestJet over Air Canada because the staff are “friendly”. Their prices are mostly the same, their schedules are worse, but the staff have a reputation for being much better than any other airline. They certainly are in my experience: WestJet is noticably better than any other airline I’ve been on (about half a dozen), including my next-best pick, JetBlue. (I haven’t flown SouthWest though.)

How much does it cost them? One would think that they have a harder time finding people to staff their organization because they have to filter out the crabbier people. However, I tend to hear that potential employees are more attracted to WestJet because of the good corporate environment. In other words: niceness can be a positive-feedback loop. It may be that WestJet doesn’t pay much extra for nice people because nice people tend to seek out and thrive in WestJet’s culture.

There’s definitely people who seem to be miserable by default. I haven’t really met their opposites (people who are cheery in nearly every situation), but I’m guessing they exist. However, the majority of all people tend to fall in the middle ground: they’re nice when they’re around other nice people and aren’t under too much stress. Their capacity to be nice exists, but it does wither if external forces cloud the landscape. This means that creating a culture of nice takes effort to maintain. It’s not a Herculean task though; some simple (and cheap) actions to eliminate the worst of the problems can allow pleasantry to flourish.

Most of the article is an attack on Sarah Palin’s beliefs and abilities as a potential President, but there is one good general quote in this recent Sam Harris article.

Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.

Twelve years ago, while I was in computer programming school, I was engaged in a debate with a not-so-knowledgeable person about the value of a career in software development. He claimed that before too long the profession would be obsolete, as computer programs would be writing computer programs, and the humans wouldn’t be necessary. (He was a medical magnet salesman; I think he was trying to convince me that his profession had more merits.)

Thankfully, I didn’t argue the point much. There would have been little point in trying to convince him anyway, but at the time I didn’t really have a strong argument against it. Circa 1996, RAD and expert systems were big buzzwords, and so it seemed at least possible that, given enough time, research, AI, and computing power, programs-to-build-programs could become reality.

A decade and a couple of computing revolutions later, this dream is looking less likely. We now know a lot more about how little we know about software development. We know how complex and chaotic it is, and we know how poorly algorithms are suited to handling those sorts of problems. We know that the best work is done in organizations that emphasize people over process.

That’s not to say that computers, algorithms and AI haven’t made some appreciable advancements in capability over the past few years. Google is the best-known example. The Roomba and it’s big-brothers SWORDS and Predator have finally brought robotic sci-fi closer to reality. There’s real progress being made on the DARPA challenges. Can software-that-writes-software be that far behind?

I’m not going to attach a timeline to that question, but I do have one insight. It came to me when listening to Stack Overflow Podcast 21 (you can read the transcript here). Jeff and Joel were discussing the role of experts in particular fields, how deep their knowledge really goes, and how applicable it is to new development. Jeff said:

…the way that I’ve characterised [software development] in the past, it’s kind of like a number in binary. Right? So you start off with a bit… which is, you know, zero or one. And then as you go from left to right, you flip all those bits, and say you have six bits. By the time you’ve flipped six unique bits, think how many combinations there are of what you’re doing. It was always amazing to me as a developer, it didn’t take very long at all to get completely off the beaten path, to where, like, virtually nobody is doing what you are doing. And it’s not like you’re doing anything weird. It’s just that you made 6 unique decisions that are all independent of each other, and software development is just kind of like that.

6 trivial changes can make 64 different possible outcomes (2 to the power of 6). What Jeff means is that no situation in software development is exactly the same as any other; the number of variables is so large that the number of outcomes is enormous.

Computers today cannot deal with that sort of complexity. They won’t be able to do so in the immediate future either. With increases in algorithm research and raw power, they might be able to do so someday. I don’t know whether or not that will happen in my lifetime.

What I do know is this: software development is probably the most complex domain in existence. That means that, if computer programs someday replace the software developer, it will be one of the last careers to be replaced. Most of the others will have long since fallen to ever-more-capable robots and algorithms. If you want something that’s future-proof, software development is probably as close as you will ever get.

Vote swapping is a kind of tactical voting whereby a vote pledges to vote for a candidate in a particular riding in exchange for another voter in a different riding supporting some other candidate. Typically, it’s used to maximize the importance of individual votes; Votes for a particular party can be moved into ridings with close races where they might change the outcome — and thus become meaningful.

The Elections Canada has just ruled that this practice is legal in Canada, and so it’s gained a bit of legitimacy and attention.

I’d be very willing to swap my vote in the upcoming federal election, but unfortunately mine isn’t worth very much. In my riding, the Conservative incumbent will probably win in a landslide. Thus far, the only alternative is Liberal Candidate Anoush Newman. I’m going to be voting against the incumbent, so no national Liberal supporter will want to swap with me. No NDP, Green, or Bloc Québécois supporter will want to swap with me either, as I won’t be able to vote for their preferred party (and it would almost certainly be a wasted vote anyway). The only possibility for a swap would be with a Conservative supporter in a left-leaning riding who wanted to add to the already-high lead that the Conservatives have here… which is pretty much pointless.

However, I do encourage anyone in a contested riding to consider swapping their vote; it’s one of the few ways that your vote will actually make a difference.

Stack Overflow is a new site that aims to be the Wikipedia of programming questions and topics. It takes the basic concept of a question/answer messageboard on programming topics, adds in voting and wiki-editing, puts a very good user interface on it, and makes it available for free. The result is an excellent site to find solutions to software development problems of all sorts.

Joel Spolsky is one of the founders; he’s written his own post about the launch.

I’ve been in the beta for about a month now, and listening to the podcasts since their inception. I’m really impressed with the quality of the site and how well they’ve achieved their goals. Their aim is a lofty one: be the best site on the entire Internet for finding answers to programming questions. Even at this early stage, I think they’ve already accomplished that; it’s now just a matter of time before Google confirms it.

If you develop software, it’s in your best interest to familiarize yourself with the site and discover its capabilities. As time goes on it could easily become your best resource on the Web for solving tricky problems effectively and efficiently.

By the way, here’s my user page, for your enjoyment.

When I went to my local bookstore to buy a copy of Predictably Irrational, I walked all the way to the back of the store to where the business books were kept. On the way in and out of the store, I passed by prominent display that housed the latest book from famous psychic Sylvia Browne. I think that is a nice theme for my next post on magicians and irrationality.

In response to my last post on irrationality Marco wrote:

The placebo effect is a pretty well understood phenomena and we can no more consider it irrational than we can consider a group of people thrilled by a magician “irrational.”

Before I can respond to this, I have to ask what “thrills” people about magicians. I don’t have a solid answer for that, but I expect that it comes from seeing people exhibit powers that appear to be unusual: i.e., they do not occurr in our everyday lives. Of course, science and technology can give us unusual powers too; Arthur C. Clarke even linked the latter directly to magic. One of my favorite classroom-level demonstrations is hammering a nail into a piece of wood with a banana that’s been dipped in liquid nitrogen. These sorts of scientific demonstrations share some of entertainment value of magical acts. However, I don’t think they have quite the same level of appeal; to my knowledge there’s no big-budget Vegas shows or prime-time TV programs dedicated to entertainment through science, as there are with magic.

Thus, I think that the impossibility of the acts being presented is part of the allure. We intellectually know that something cannot happen, yet we see it appear to happen with our own eyes. We want to believe that the impossible is possible, and so the demonstration thrills us… and so we believe just a tiny bit. That’s nearly the definition of irrationality. But, in the end, the impossible cannot happen, and magicians use a bevy of tricks and illusions to make us believe the unbelieveable. Magians are masters of the natural, not of the supernatural.

Some magicians like to claim that they do, in fact, have supernatural powers. When they do, they cross the line from entertainers to con artists. I consider people like Sylvia Browne, Uri Geller, and John Edward to be more hurtful than Harry Houdini, David Copperfield and David Blaine because they become meta-deceptive: they are deciptful about their deception. Without self-imposed limits on their trickery, they prey upon vulnerable people like parasites.

For what it’s worth, I don’t really like most magic shows myself. I know that the claimed powers are nothing more than (relatively) mundane tricks, and I tend to feel frustrated when I can’t figure out what the trick actually is. I do enjoy seeing the tricks explained; Penn & Teller are the poster boys for this sort of entertainment. (Not surprisingly, Penn & Teller are also noted skeptics, debunkers, and atheists.)

Yesterday I read this excellent essay by Johnathan Haidt entitled What Makes People Vote Republican?. I also sent it to Marco, who wrote a blog post on it called Why the Democrats don’t get it …. I strongly recommend reading Haidt’s article, and Marco’s ongoing U.S. political commentary is good stuff too.

In the comments for Marco’s post I wrote:

One important thing to realize is that most people aren’t strictly rational much of the time; rather than change their beliefs they’ll instead rationalize them and reject any challenges to them. Thus, people frequently believe that the system they’re in is really in their best interests, even if it’s objectively not. This is how oppression of all magnitudes (from head scarves to police states) continues to exist; people accept and rationalize it to some degree and thus don’t work harder to throw off the shackles. Making a rational argument against this often won’t work — it’s not that people aren’t aware of the rational points, it’s that they ignore them.

To which Marco responded:

Thinking that “people” are irrational but “we” are not is where the elitist label comes from. Check the polls to see how well that’s doin’.

…

I do believe there is right and wrong–and that some things are wrong–but I do not just assume I am “more rational” than those who disagree. I think that’s a dangerous preconception to have

My choice of the word “irrational” has a lot to do with the book I’m currently reading: Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. It’s a great introduction into the field of behavioural economics: the science of decision making and the consequences thereof. The book deals extensively with how people tend to make decisions based on less-significant factors instead of more-significant ones. The classic example is that of the cost of a painkiller drug and its relationship on effectiveness. When patients receive painkillers, the amount of pain reduction they experience is proportional to the the cost they believe the drug posesses. A higher-cost painkiller provides more relief than a lower-cost one, even if the actual drug involved is the same in both cases. These sorts of effects and beliefs are called “irrational” because they exist solely within the human mind, and are often emotionally-based.

The point I was trying to make in my post was that irrationality will often trump rationality in the mind of a person. If that is the case, then attempting to change belief and behavior by making a strictly rational argument is doomed to fail. This is similar to what Haidt writes; he implores the U.S. Democrats to adjust their strategy (but not their principles) to trigger the value judgements of a wider range of voters (something that the U.S. Republicans have been more successful at over the past two decades). My belief is that any position must take into account (and probably leverage) the irrationality that exists within people in order to be successful. Where Haidt and I overlap is concerning held values that happen to be irrational. We both agree that these cannot be ignored — which how they are treated by significant portion of the Americal liberal population. Because this same population also tends to be more educated than the rest, they also receive the label “elitist”, which further alientates them and hurts their cause.

As Marco correctly points out, there is plenty of risk surrounding the question of rationality. We all act irrationally at least some of the time, and we all (irrationally) misjudge how much our beliefs are rational. Any truly rational action will have to take this into account by imposing objective checks upon itself. Assuming that disagreement equals irrationality (as Marco puts it) is certainly counterproductive.

From In a Parachute-Effectiveness Trial, Who Gets the Placebo?.

It might be argued that the pressure exerted on individuals to use parachutes is yet another example of a natural, life-enhancing experience being turned into a situation of fear and dependency. The widespread use of the parachute may just be another example of doctors’ obsession with disease prevention and their misplaced belief in unproved technology to provide effective protection against occasional adverse events.

Fark sometimes has the best headlines:

A 73-year old widow in Manila, Philippines was hypnotized and robbed in the street by a short woman who pretended to be lost. Baffled local police are on the lookout for a small medium at large

When I was a kid, adults often told me I would be rich and famous some day. Apparently I was giving off some sort of ambition vibe early on. I think ambition is a genetic defect. You can’t have ambition unless you think there is something wrong with the way you are. Ambition is a state of feeling perpetually flawed.

From Dilbert Blog.