I often make the analogy that our online social spaces can be thought of like real, physical spaces and I draw inspiration from examples of successful interaction in physical space and how it can teach us how to fix broken social interaction online. Nina, instead, draws inspiration from examples of successful social interaction in virtual spaces and figures out to fix broken social interactions in physical museum spaces. It was fascinating seeing this inversion of viewpoints and it’s got my mind churning about the possible implications that her work has on social interaction design.

Participatory Spaces

After Dunbar’s Number, the 90/9/1 rule is probably the second most heard of and misunderstood snippet of pop psychology that dabbling amateurs know about social interaction design. What most people believe the 90/9/1 rule implies is that it’s the natural order of things that only 1% of your users will ever be active contributors and the rest will be passive consumers. This may be fine for consumer Web 2.0 companies who build their business model around this but it’s unacceptable for museums who’s main charter is broad based participation for all.

Nina gave the example of an psychedelic music exhibition in which one of the participatory activities was that visitors could create their own band posters. Now, if the visitors were just provided with blank pieces of paper and art materials, the participation rate would be dismal and the quality low as had happened in other museum exhibits in the past. But what was clever about this exhibit was that they provided cut outs from previous band posters which visitors could assemble underneath a plastic overlay and then draw on top of them before handing them to an attendant who then made a color photocopy of it.

What’s amazing was that, of the over 90,000 people who went through this exhibit, they managed to achieve over a 30% participation rate and astounding 25 minutes on average were spent making those posters… 25 minutes people, that’s an engagement figure that any web 2.0 company would drool to see for a task so basic.

If by such simple tweaks, we can shift the participation curve so far to the left, how much credence should we put in the 90/9/1 rule?

Building high quality conversation

It’s a somewhat disconcerting experience, after talking about commenting systems for so long to be confronted with the design of actual, real life commenting systems.

Unsurprisingly, real life commenting systems, if casually designed, suffer from the exact same pathologies that online commenting systems do. Also, unsurprisingly, simple design tweaks can also dramatically alter the tenor of conversation. Nina said that one of the worst questions she’s ever seen a museum ask people to comment on is “How do you define nanotechnology”. It was esoteric, it was objective and, more importantly, why would any visitor care what another visitor’s answer was?

On the contrary, this was the best question that she has ever seen asked:

To answer the question of “Would you go to Mars”, you go through one of the two marked turnstiles. Then, at the end of the exhibit, you are asked the same question and go through the same process. What was striking was that the answer to the initial question leaned 75% towards yes and 25% towards no but the answer at the end was completely inverted with 2/3rds saying no and only 1/3rd saying yes.

I think one of the best examples from the presentation was of a Jack Kerouac exhibit she did where the comments were actually typed on one of Kerouac’s original typewriters. The design of the commenting space differs so little from the first, unstructured example but the quality speaks for itself.

Which leads me to…

The sensitivity to conditions of successful social design

One of the most striking things coming from Nina’s examples of both successful and unsuccessful projects was how all of the really great projects sprang from a harmonic convergence of wonderful design decisions. On the other hand, a single wrong choice among otherwise excellent design was enough to derail the entire social experience.

These two wombats were an example she gave of something that left her feeling sad and lonely because she didn’t have another person to go through the activity with. It’s interesting to speculate just how minor a tweak it might have taken for this to instead, be a focus point for fostering introductions between strangers. One person from the audience suggested making the wombats look at each other rather than side by side. Nina herself wondered if adding “find another person of the same gender” might have been all the impetus necessary.

In preparation to sell my work to people outside of the design field, mostly engineers and business people, I’ve been focusing my attention on turning my half baked intuitions and analogies into a “methodology” with “solid theoretical grounding”. I was doing so much of that that I even somewhat convinced myself. Nina’s talk made me reappreciate that good social design must necessarily involve a healthy dose of ineffable magic as well as solid, reasoned technique and it’s the marrying of those two that makes a great social interaction designer.

Find out more

I’ve only talked about a sliver of what Nina presented last night. If you want to see the presentation, Nina’s slides are online and a podcast of the talk will eventually get posted on the BayCHI homepage. If you want to know more about Nina’s work, you can follow her on her blog and if you want even more insight, you should buy her book.

If you want to know more about the work I do, my portfolio is pretty incomplete right now but it has a sample of the work I do.  I much prefer to talk about my work in person. I’m in the Bay Area until March 20th and then hopping between Seattle & Bay Area after that. Feel free to email me at hang@bumblebeelabs.com to arrange a meeting or just chat. I also have a presentation called “Space & Narrative: Designing for Social Interaction” if you know a group of people who would be interested in hearing about my work. I’m also looking to get hired to an interesting position, working on projects that have impact so if you know anyone who’s looking for my particular skill set, have them get in touch with me at hang@bumblebeelabs.com

Related posts:

1. Oct 24th (day 12): Conversations around porn
2. CHI 2009: Day 4 & Lab Tours
3. Introducing myself…

In the first of my Hacker News Dinner Parties, I was cooking a vegetarian feast for James and his lovely girlfriend in their Berkeley pad. James is a lone startup guy, with some really interesting thoughts about how do we remake education into a more participatory process and how do we pull in the ambient, out-of-classroom experiences to add depth and context to the learning experience. He’s also, at this very moment, on The Startup Bus on it’s way to SXSW. The Startup Bus is this crazy experiment of seeing whether hackers work like plutonium atoms. If you jam them in a tight space under sufficient pressure over enough time, will something really interesting happen or will we end up with corpses strewn along the road and a suspiciously higher incidence of cancer for the next 50 years? Obviously, anyone willing to do something so ridiculous would be fun to cook for.

Seeing as how we had to pop in to The Startup Bus sendoff party first to drink some of their beer and talk to a bunch of cool hackers, it wasn’t until 8:30pm that we actually got started on the cooking so this first dinner ended up being pretty simple but still delicious. Also, I figured out that night that having a fully charged camera battery is pretty useless when it’s not actually in the camera so apologies for the poor quality iPhone pics.

First Course

Salad of Greens, Pears, Pumpkin Seeds & Brie, Honey Mustard Dressing

The key to a good salad is contrast. This salad had the crunch from the greens & the pumpkin seeds and the softness from the pears & brie. It had bitter from the greens, sweetness from the pears & honey, salty & pungent from the brie and sour from the sherry vinegar in the dressing. As long as you follow these principles, salads are a great platform to improvise & riff from. All the ingredients for this salad were pulled out of James’ fridge because they needed to be used up. Less is more in this case, choose a few key ingredients that you want to showcase the harmony. In this case, the salad had the right balance between all of the various elements and it turned out pretty tasty.

Second Course

Penne with a Roasted Bell Pepper & Grape Tomato Sauce

This is an old standby of mine which I return back to because of the purity of flavors. It’s a recipe that I developed independently although I’m sure it’s a common dish in many cultures.

At it’s core, it’s simply roasted bell peppers and grape tomatoes. Core & flatten a sheetpan’s worth of bell peppers (about 6), brush them with oil and place them under a broiler for 15 – 20 minutes. You want the skins charred and blackened so don’t be afraid that you’re burning them. Once they’re nicely charred, put them in a bowl covered in saran wrap and the residual steam from the peppers will help loosen the skins. Throw the grape tomatoes in the same sheetpan and put them under the broiler again until they’re burst and also slightly charred. After about another 10 minutes, the grape tomatoes should be cooked and the peppers are cool enough to handle so pull as much of the skin off as you can with your hands and then roughly chop the peppers into 1/2 in pieces. Put half the peppers & tomatoes in a blender & puree, then mix in the other half as chunks, correct the seasoning and mix with the pasta and serve. That’s it! The simplest version of this dish is just two ingredients! The puree provides the body for the sauce & the chunks add a bit of textural contrast. This technique also really brings out and highlights the inherent sweetness and complexity of good ingredients. Because it’s such a simple base, it’s also another great jumping off point for riffing off a theme.

At this dinner party, we sauteed some garlic, green onion & chilli flakes in some olive oil, added in some white wine and reduced it down and then hit it with a splash of lemon at the end to add a bit of zing. Basil, oregano or other herbs are great. For non-vegetarians, I commonly do this with some chicken breast, shrimp or pork tenderloin. Replacing one or more of the bell peppers with chilli peppers adds a interesting heat to the dish. It’s really a great starting off point for a lazy weekday pasta dinner.

Third Course

Creme Caramel with Honey Glazed Apples

I’ve never been much of a sweets person so desserts are, admittedly, not my forte. That being said, a creme caramel is really a brainless, easy to knock out dessert. The custard base is some combination of eggs, milk & sugar. I still have to look up the proportions every time so don’t feel guilty if you can’t remember them. In this case, I used a caramel base but any sort of jam also works great as a base (Saffron-Cardamon with a Rose Petal Jelly base is ridiculous). Put them in the oven at 325 in a water bath and just cook until they jiggle like a fat man running up stairs. For the apples, peel, core & dice some apples and sautee them in butter until you get bored. Add some honey and just a little bit of lemon juice to cut the sweetness and you’re done. Simple, brainless and a very “cheffy” style dessert.

I have to say, the first of these Hacker News dinners was a resounding success. The food was good, the wine was plentiful and James was a really interesting guy to talk to. Tonight, I’m going to BayCHI (I’ll be the guy in the red fedora) so hit me up via email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com if you’re also planning to be there.

No related posts.

Ever since I started Bumblebee Labs, I had always flirted with the idea of working for a large company and that attraction has waxed & waned with the ups and downs of Bumblebee Labs. While I enjoyed the all encompassing education that founding a startup brings, this forced interlude has made me realize how much I miss the luxury of deep thinking. To be able to focus on my original, abiding passion of social design is something that sounds immensely appealing to me at this stage in my life. As a result, I’m formally placing myself out on the job market and I’ve started to actively look for a role that I feel suits me.

My ideal role is to work for a company building interesting social software and to bring in my philosophy around social design, both to help them clarify how to understand the intersection between social behaviors & design (such as thinking about plausible deniability); and also to be a catalyst for novel social interface elements that improves the success of that product (see Friennuendo & Friendbo). My problem is, the type of job I want is not something you can apply for in a job ad. The role of social designer is one most companies aren’t even aware exists let alone one that they need. I figure, my best strategy is to meet face to face with people so I can convince them that they need to create a job that matches my skillset.

I will be down in San Francisco from March 6th to March 21st and then splitting my time fairly evenly between San Francisco & Seattle until I settle on an opportunity. I am available for:

• If you want to meet individually, I’m happy to have coffee with you anytime, just shoot me an email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com and we’ll figure something out.
• If you think your workplace or a group you’re part of might be interested in what I have to say, I have a 20 minute – 1 hour presentation titled “Space & Narratives: Designing for Social Interaction” which I’m happy to give to any audience (even if you have no intention of hiring me, invite me anyway. I’m always happy to talk about my work).
• If you know someone who might be interested in meeting with me, please forward them a link to this post.
• If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog & you’re in San Francisco on the dates that I am there, I will cook for you. That’s right, I will cook for you. Details here

I’m excited about this next phase I’m about to embark on and you should really contact me if you want to embark on it together with me.

Related posts:

1. What is Bumblebee Labs?
2. New Logo
3. Introducing myself…

It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we’d found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

There is a persistent meme, which this article is only helping reinforce, that user experience professionals are needed because the average user is far less intelligent than the average designer so we need to hire some people who can “think stupid” just like the user. Such thinking doesn’t benefit anyone, developers lose respect for the user and start creating condescending, dumbed down UIs. Users continue to find the new software hard to use because it doesn’t address their core issues.

Users aren’t so much unintelligent as they are distracted and indifferent

Your average user may be perfectly competent and zip through your app like a charm when they’re in a controlled setting, focusing exclusively on your application and incentivized to succeed. But such a scenario is almost never likely to happen in the real world. What’s more realistic is that they’re devoting, at best, 10% of their attention towards your app while they have the TV blaring in the background, an IM conversation they’re also involved in, thoughts about whether that meeting with the boss tomorrow means a promotion or getting fired. Your application is at best, 5th on their priority list and they’re largely moving on autopilot as they navigate through it. Once you understand this basic reality, user behavior becomes a lot easier to understand.

A couple of years ago, a grizzled UX professional taught me one invaluable fact.

Drunk people are a pretty accurate mimic of distracted, indifferent people

This insight has lead to a wonderful technique I’ve been refining over the years that I call “The $5 Guerrilla User Test”.

The $5 Guerrilla User Test

Here’s the 5 second version:

1. Bring a laptop to a bar
2. Offer to buy someone a beer in exchange for participating in a user study
3. Watch your application crash & burn as people do all sorts of ridiculous ass shit they would never do in a lab but constantly do in real life
4. Go back, apply the lessons you have learnt, repeat until you have an app that is 100% drunk person proof

This is the slightly longer version for those who are interested:

• Like conventional user studies this is best done with a group of two, one to run through the script, the other to take notes.
• Approach in a friendly manner, explain who you are and who you work for and ask them if you can have a moment of their time.
• If they don’t seem receptive from the get go, thank them for their time and move on to a different target
• Explain to them that you want some insight on a piece of software you’re currently building and tell them that you’re willing to buy them a pint of beer as compensation for their participation
• If they accept (and 90% of them will), ask them their preference of beer and then ask your partner to go off and order it
• While you’re waiting for your partner, inform them of your data collection policies, the procedure and the standard stuff about how they can quit at any time. It doesn’t much matter what exactly you say to them, the key is to make it boring. This step is key. When you first approached them, you were something novel for the night so they’re interested and motivated to perform. 2 minutes of dull chatter is going to lose their attention and they’re back to being utterly indifferent about your problems again.
• Once your partner gets back, run it just like any other user study.
• At the end, hand them their beer, thank them for their time and drop off some business cards for some easy word of mouth marketing. If you offer any sort of premium features, give them a year’s access to it as a gift as well. It’s a nice surprise and converts surprisingly well.

That’s it! It’s cheap, fast, can be done by anyone and gives you insights you never would have gotten hiring a professional usability consulting firm. Go out and do it!

Here’s a couple more tips I’ve picked up over the years:

• The first time you do it, you’re probably going to be suffering from approach anxiety. Start off approaching a group of the same sex as you so that the encounter isn’t sexualized. Next, move on to a mixed sex group and then finish the night with an opposite gender interaction so you get a nice demographic spread.
• Focus on people who don’t normally get talked to at bars, middle aged people, homely girls, the guy sitting in the corner.
• People alone, reading a book, have a 50% chance of agreeing to participate. People alone, reading a newspaper, have a 99% chance of agreeing to participate.
• If you ever get the feeling that you’re being messed with, politely end the experiment, give them their beer and move on to the next round of testing.
• Groups of all guys tend to be the only ones who ever mess with you. I avoid asking them as a rule.
• You want someone who’s pretty drunk but not completely trashed. A good way to calibrate is to keep on asking progressively drunker people until your results become garbage, then back off one notch from there. After a few rounds, you learn to spot the signs of an ideal participant.
• Conveniently for you, weekdays end up being more effective than weekends so you can do this after work.
• I generally try to keep the entire session down to around an hour which works out to be roughly 4 * 15 minute user studies. Much more than that is tiring and too much data to analyze the next day.
• While beer is good before & after the user study, try and keep beer away during the user study. Spilled beer on a laptop can be an expensive mistake.
• Bars are wonderful at segmenting by demographic. Match the bar you’re going to with the user population you want to target. Different bars will produce slightly different results but the variation is not huge.
• If you’re planning on regularly using one bar to do your tests, tip the bartender well from the start, like, 30 – 40%. That extra $1 you spend isn’t going to break the bank and having a bartender on your side brings all sorts of benefits.
• edit: One extra tip from a friend, mobile app development benefits even more from this technique since mobile use tends to involve even more distraction. Users are using your app while walking down the street, driving, holding a conversation etc.

Anyway, that’s it. I’d love to hear from people how their experience with the $5 Guerrilla User Test goes.

Related posts:

1. Oct 21st (day 9): Test driven management
2. Not impressed with the iPhone user interaction
3. The fallacy of the facebook redesign

Imagine you your job was to find the highest point on a random Frank Gehry designed building, say the Hotel Marques de Riscal. The problem is, you’re blind so you can only determine the height of one point at a time.

Hotel Marque de Riscal

One way to do it would be to take the entire outside shell of the structure and turn it upside down and then drop a ball bearing in it. When the ball bearing stops moving, you declare that point to be probably the lowest point.

Upside Down Hotel Marque de Riscal

In the field of optimization, this is called hill climbing and it sure is fast but the problem with it is obvious: the ball bearing will likely drop into some rut on the side of the building before reaching the bottom (aka: a local minima).

Simulated annealing is like adding a giant paint shaker and imagining the ball bearing getting heavier over time. At first, the ball bearing is light as a feather and every random vibration is going to make it bounce around, sometimes to a lower point but also sometimes to a higher point. Over time, as the ball bearing gets heavier, it becomes progressively harder to jostle out of it’s rut but when it does move, it moves to a lower rut some distance away. Finally, the ball bearing becomes so heavy it’s virtually impossible to budge, at which point, you declare that position to be probably the lowest point. Simulated annealing can still get trapped in local minima but it usually does a hell of a lot better than hill climbing.

Now, imagine that the ball bearing is society and it’s searching for the solution to a problem like, say, attaching sheets of paper together. If you’re living in any time since the 1930’s, it’s overwhelmingly likely that you’ll be reaching for a “Gem” style paperclip.

A Gem style paperclip

What many people don’t realize is that the Gem paperclip wasn’t the only type of paperclip invented. In fact, the 1909 Websters Dictionary entry on paperclips referred to the “Konaclip” version which was considered the prototypical paperclip of the time.

A Konaclip style paperclip

From 1864 when the first paperclip patent was granted, till 1930 when the gem became dominant, there were literally dozens of designs for paperclips (which, thankfully, has been documented on the Paperclip section of the Early Office Museum). But since the 1930’s, technological progress in the paperclip arena has ground to a halt with the entirety of society standardizing on the Gem and every other style dying in obscurity (For a much more detailed look into the paperclip’s fascinating history, I refer you to the book The Evolution of Useful Things).

To explain this history, I refer back to the simulated annealing analogy. In the early days of paperclipdom, society wasn’t particularly attached to any one design so there was very little momentum in the system. Even a tiny vibration was enough to make another design viable. However, as time went on, certain styles of paperclips started to have legacy effects and it became a race between a few, select alternatives, most notably the Konaclip & the Gem. Finally, society had settled so firmly upon the Gem that it it would take the most extraordinary effort to have any other design supplant it which is why it remains the paperclip of choice to this day. In Simulated Annealing terms, the entropy was now so low that it became practically impossible to escape from a local minima.

Indeed, one of the characteristics of simulated annealing is that it goes through 3 distinct phases. A period of fluid, diverse shifting, a long period of stagnation punctuated by occasional radical shifts and then finally stability from which only incremental improvement is possible.

Looking at the pattern of historical developments of other technologies, it’s possible to spot these same shifts in between phases.

Before 1973, there was a diverse ecosystem of physical interaction paradigms for desktop computing. The most notable examples from that era were Ivar Sutherland’s Sketchpad using light pen interaction and Alan Kay’s tablet style Dynabook.

Sketchpad circa 1963

Dynabook circa 1972

Then, in 1973, the Xerox Alto was released and virtually halted the progress of computer interfaces from that point forward. Nearly every desktop computer today is a recognizable descendant of the Xerox Alto.

Xerox Alto circa 1973

The list of genuine innovations in physical UI that have been adopted since the Alto are as laughably few in number as they are trivial in scope. In rough order of importance: Speakers, microphones, webcams, the mouse wheel, wireless networking, higher resolution screens, a numpad, flatter screens & the Windows/Command button (this is not a sampling, it’s the complete list).

The list of potential innovations are as staggering as they are futile: Pen computing, Tabletop computing, Tablet computing, Augmented & Virtual Reality, Touch based interaction, Multitouch, MultiMouse, Bimanual Interaction, Single Display Groupware, 3D displays and the list goes on and on. In the last 37 years, billions of dollars have been poured into these alternative technologies in a vain attempt to supplant the Xerox Alto as the dominant paradigm with pretty much nothing to show from all that work except a bunch of pretty pilot projects.

And with each passing year, it’s become more and more difficult to foster a viable alternative paradigm because more and more gets invested into keeping Alto style computing firmly entrenched. Software is designed for a keyboard+mouse+screen, people have invested time learning the intricacies of a WIMP OS and thousands of companies have a vested interest in keeping the system entrenched.

The same pattern can be found in keyboard layouts with QWERTY, programming languages with C, web standards with HTML+CSS+JS, Office Productivity with Microsoft Office, Email with Eudora and so forth. In every instance, a period of rapid innovation was brought abruptly to a close with a dominant technology and, from that point forward, genuine changes in the status quo happen at best every decade and only after extraordinary effort *.

Almost every discussion of a new innovation focuses on the details of the innovation almost exclusively without considering the broader social context. Such discussion manages to miss the vital point that adoption of an innovation depends only a tiny bit on the actual innovation and almost completely on the current progress of society. Once a technology has reached a certain maturity point, whatever local minima that society has currently reached will establish itself be the dominant technology until the end of time regardless of what technological progress has occurred or has yet to occur. Like a game of musical chairs, it’s all about when the music stops. If you’ve managed to grab a seat at the table, then you’ll stay there forever, if you missed your spot, then it’s going to take extraordinary effort to regain it, no matter how much of an improvement you are over the status quo.

* This same model also explains why European & Japanese mobile & broadband technology is so far in advance of the US even thought the US were the pioneers of both technologies. Because the US started early, it’s industry matured around an earlier technological & social standard which caused it to fall behind the less mature, more technologically limber peers.

Related posts:

1. The future hiding in plain sight
2. Oct 29th (day 17): Thinking about the existance of god
3. A better way of serving ads

Lets start with what were not the reasons I posted it.

It was not because I agreed with him. I differ with Aug Bohr on several substantial points and his conclusion has not managed to convince me.

I did not post it an a deliberate attempt to offend readers or drum up controversy. Yes, there was plenty to be offended by in the post but this was a side effect of the argument being made.

I posted it because it was heresy and, for the ideals of the free exchange of ideas to flourish, heresy must be allowed to stand on it’s own merits.

The free exchange of ideas is not a natural condition. We have fought to establish it and it’s existence is fragile at best. Heresy is where the battles of intellectual freedom are fought. Where heresy is allowed to stand, intellectual stagnation follows. Taboos become entrenched & advancement becomes more about adopting the “correct” position than the true position. The only way to prevent this intellectual stagnation is to become virulently allergic to judgment based on ideology and a dedication to focusing on content alone.

But humans, in their natural state, are supremely uncomfortable with heresy. The reaction, when confronted with an argument that you violently disagree with is to try and make it false as quickly and efficiently as possible. Oh, the author must be a bitter, misogynistic hack. Oh, the standards for evidence were not met. Oh, it relies on a poor grasp of evolutionary psychology. Anything to make the argument go away. This is not acceptable. Look past the ideology, evaluate it like you would evaluate any other argument, hold it to the same standards. Don’t flinch.

“Why women don’t understand friendship” isn’t a great argument. But it’s also not a bad one. It’s intriguing and also presents a perspective that I had never heard before. I posted it because if it had been on any other topic, I would have considered it worthy of posting. To have not posted it would have been a betrayal of an ideal that I hold dear.

Related posts:

1. Women Don’t Understand Friendship
2. Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor
3. Noone is born atheist

Friendship is a peculiar type of relationship. It has no formalization of status, no hard and fast beginning or conclusion. Even more strangely, a search through your memory for the segue from acquaintanceship for a specific friend will draw an amnesia-like blank. Yet even as it seems so elusive, it’s the strongest, most critical type of connection humans can forge with one another.

Can men and women be friends? No, but not for the reason that immediately comes to mind. Latent sexual desire is not the fork in the gears of an intersex friendship. It may be the scapegoat, but what is really at play is a woman’s incapacity to be friends with anyone, including another woman.

I will argue that fully half the population has no conception of friendship. It does not exist for them in the same way that childbirth does not exist for men. Instead, they are observing and approximating what men do, going through motions and playing along. Before vehemently coming out in favor or against this conclusion, consider the following.

Men are worthless. Not rhetorically worthless or metaphorically worthless. Actually worthless. You could toss 95% of the world’s men into a meat grinder to make hotdogs and the birthrate and overall quality of life of everyone would be unaffected. A single rich man can father and support hundreds of children in a single generation. Reducing the number of women, however, drops the birthrate and the desire and ability to care for children by that much.

Though the realization is not a conscious one, men understand it on some level, and their life is a continuous battle to avoid irrelevance. A man cannot create life, and due to his fast recycle time in the part he does play in creating life, another man could easily step in and take his place. This so defines man’s existence that the inability to ejaculate when the woman desires it has been medicalized, a subtle hint to his innate worthlessness. To keep his genetic destiny from disappearing because a better man could spare fifteen minutes and the equivalent of his salary, men struggle to assert their worth.

Monogamous marriage benefits the common man over both women and wealthy men. If Bill Gates were allowed to take as many wives as he could support, thousands of poorer men would be left out in the cold. Certainly not all women would accept a generous stipend and fatherly non-interference over the alternative, but that is not required for the numbers to work against the common man. Men agree to take only one wife so that everyone can at least have the one.

Men are the architects of civilization, the government leaders and founders, the discoverers, the inventors, the explorers. Not because they are better at these things or more suited to do them or even because they’re bullies. They do these things because if they don’t, they are worthless. Their life is a constant struggle to prove they are more valuable alive than put through a meat grinder. When women do undertake these endeavors, they often have above average level of testosterone, the chemical which seems to engender this sensation of worthlessness.

Men have always fought the wars, built the buildings, and hunted the game. These are activities which can only be done with a uniquely intimate cooperation. To this day, managing a war or construction project is an extraordinary problem not only in implementation but in trust. Men tens of thousands of years ago accomplished these tasks with no oversight and minimal communication. It was a remarkable feat, perhaps facilitated by a new form of intimate connection, friendship.

There is no need to define friendship in terms of what it is when we can define what it does through group selection. It is simply a type of human relationship which, when experienced by members of a tribe, allowed that tribe to outdo its foes. A tribe with friendship will always defeat a non-friendship tribe in a raid. A friendship tribe will return with more food from a hunt, will always build a shelter faster in a downpour. This was all that was required for us to become descendants of those with the capacity for friendship.

Women did forage for food, which actually provided most of the tribe’s sustenance. Foraging, however, does not benefit from cooperation in the same way as a three-day hunt. These men had to sacrifice for each other, even give up their lives for each other in raids, and to understand each others’ signals and intentions. This was equally true in war and construction. Women had no comparable activity for which cooperation of this degree was necessary. This, however, doesn’t explain the mystery of why women don’t possess even a vestigial sense of friendship. That is, unless the ability to sacrifice for one another actually handicaps their pursuit of genetically high quality children.

It does. Women primarily competed to get the best man, and men competed to get the best woman. However, the cheapness of sperm meant men had no motivation to ration it, whereas eggs, if successfully fertilized, mean at minimum a yearlong investment. This is what forces men into the role of putting on displays while women sit back and choose. While women stepped over each other to get the best man, men’s displays further improved, in the form of civilization, something that can’t be created alone.

You can witness this to this day when you go to the bar. A woman will sabotage her “friend” if that friend is hit on by a man she’s interested in. Even if she’s not interested, she’ll almost instinctually sabotage her. The wingman practice only exists because these women are only friends so long as a man does not come between them. Men must be such good friends because women are natural enemies, no matter how long they’ve known each other or how great a display of friendship they advertise.

And it is women doing all the advertising. “We are such good friends! Jenny is my best friend in the whole world!“ Men never speak of friendship, and they especially do not rank who their best friend is. For men, the concept is so fucking visceral, so tangible, that blathering on about who is and who isn’t a friend would be like talking about the ground they walk on. “Isn’t the ground great? This is the best ground!” It’s either ground or it isn’t. If you’re walking on it, it’s fulfilling its purpose, and its purpose is entirely encapsulated by the term “ground.” The only motivation to make noise about such an entity would be for exhibition. It does not exist for you, and you are trying your best to approximate something you see others partake in so naturally.

When pressed to define it, women display an almost infantile conception of friendship. A woman’s friends are the people she talks to often, who make her feel good, who she has things in common with. In other words, frequently-seen acquaintances. A five-year-old would list similar criteria. When women do challenge the friendship of two men, their questions betray their conception. “If you’re such good friends, what’s his favorite color/middle name?” Knowing details about someone has as much to do with friendship as the brand of a bottle of water has to do with whether it’ll keep you from dehydrating.

Women may claim their best friend and mate are one in the same. A woman does tend to absorb her mate entirely, going as far as integrating his preference in sports teams into her own identity, but this is an unrelated type of connection. Joining with someone so closely that your goals and future blend together is a truly deep connection, and one women are certainly capable of, but it is at the expense of friendship, not as a shining example. Women who follow the absorption pattern of pair bonding almost always require complete compliance from their friends. Anyone who questions her relationship with her mate is cut loose without hesitation. It is almost as if women have the capacity for exactly one relationship. If her mate emotionally drifts away 20%, she’ll reach out to someone to fill the gap. Once he returns, the new fill-in is placed in cold storage.

If what women call friendship is in fact acquaintanceship, surely an experiment can be designed to reveal this. How one understands exclusively online friendship is an excellent litmus. Talking to someone online allows intimacy, commonality, superficial shared adversity, and frequency of communication. It does not, however, allow friendship. An online acquaintance never has the chance to give you their last sip of water on a long hike or risk life and limb to save your child from a lion. If you have no conception of actual friendship, the objection you’re now having is, “Someone can’t lie forever. Eventually you do get to know them and what kind of person they are.”

This misses the point entirely. The issue is not what kind of person they are; it is that entire facets of their personality, both positive and negative, cannot express themselves without a real life connection. Online friendship may allow more commonality, honesty, and understanding than real life, but these are extremely low on the Maslow hierarchy of friendship. An artificial intelligence could supply these while being completely unconscious and lacking all integrity and character. Who knows, your online friends may in fact give up a finger so you can keep your hand, but without the opportunity for this to happen, it is irrelevant. This defining facet of friendship is completely shielded by lack of real life interaction. For this reason, men will overwhelmingly say that friendship cannot exist online, and women will say it can.

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The women were led to believe they were being filmed for a Big Brother-type television programme, according to the Dogan news agency and other news reports. Instead, their naked images were sold on the internet by their captors.

They were made to sign a contract which stipulated that they could have no contact with their families or the outside world, and would have to pay a fine of 50,000 Turkish lira (£20,000) if they left the show in the first two months, the agency reported.

She said the women were not abused or harassed sexually, but that they were told to fight each other, to wear bikinis and to dance by the villa’s pool.

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Are there professional athletes who are unable to walk? Are there professional accountants who cannot do math? Are there professional postmodern english lit professors who occasionally let slip with a comprehensible sentence? I’d like to have some insightful insight at this point but the sheer lucridity of it has me baffled.

I’ve mentioned previously that the reason this company is named Bumblebee Labs is from a term I coined:

A bumblebee is an occurrence which cannot be explained by our current theory and thus, demands special attention. Bumblebees are the keys to uncovering areas where our understanding of the world drastically fail and how we can construct a better theory to explain what is happening.

and the FizzBuzz paradox is a Bumblebee of the highest order.

Just once, I’d like to hear the FizzBuzz story from the other side. I’d like to hear a veteran software engineer, confirmed to have been working on multiple projects and with largely positive references explain how he managed to fool so many people for so long about his basic competency in programming. Does this person know that they’re a bad programmer or are they suffering from a severe case of Dunning-Kreuger? How does knowing that you’re a fraud every single day weigh upon your psyche? How do your team mates treat you?

Sure, there are many other fields in which blatant frauds continue to go unexposed for many years: art, academia, holistic medicine, cult leaders etc. But everyone knows that fraud is endemic in these fields. Sure, there are fields in which people are completely self delusional about their ability: music, writing, acting. But everyone else knows those people are crap and never let them do anything of significance. Software Engineering shouldn’t be like those field. It should be like every other respectable, solid career. And yet it’s not.. why?

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