It is a very entertaining read and it will likely appeal to lots of people interested in behavioral psychology or popular science. Apparently, it is doing well on Amazon, too. As of today, the hardcover version is ranking on four different lists:

Surprisingly, here is how the Kindle version is ranking.

That is a curious difference in categorization.

“Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”
[...]
“Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”

This is an interesting approach and it apparently worked for him to some extent, given his productivity as an author. The aforementioned book also explains why this would have worked:

The Nothing Alternative is a bright-line rule: a clear, unmistakable boundary [...]. Chandler’s particular rule – If I can’t write, I will do nothing – is also an example of an implementation plan, that specific if-x-then-y strategy that has been shown to reduce the demands on willpower.

He made it a personal policy, essentially resolving to not allow himself any other real options, during the time that he dedicated to writing.

In Privacy Is Dead – Long Live Surveillance Symmetry, Jakob Eriksson describes an interesting view on our current landscape of increasingly changing privacy expectations. His main point: We would not be as concerned about losing our privacy, if those spying on us lost it equally.

If we weren’t so careful about hiding our differences from each other, we’d come to realize that not fitting the standard stereotype is the real norm. If you’re not an alcoholic, a neat freak, in debt to your ears, battling hair loss, having an affair with the neighbor’s wife, or something equally shocking, then something is probably wrong with you, not with the rest of us. I believe technology will force this societal change to happen, but even if it didn’t, it really is time we all grew up and came out of our respective closets.

In a recent tragedy, a college student committed suicide after a revealing video was posted online. My hypothesis is that the problem wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong in the video or even anything particularly unusual or shameful. Fundamentally, this was a problem of information asymmetry. While the rest of the world could all see him in his most private moment, this insecure young fellow couldn’t see them in theirs, and it was too much to bear.

It is an interesting thought. I also do not think that this could be a complete answer.

Would travelers at airports be more accepting of being examined with backscatter x-ray machines, if they could also view images of security personnel that were produced by those machines, when that staff was examined?

Would we be understanding, if our neighbors positioned motion-activated cameras to capture the activities in our home, if we did the same to them?

Many, many more examples can be imagined. Like so often, I think the answer here is: It depends. What is acceptable for one person in one context will not be for a different person or in a different context.

I discovered an excerpt online that happens to include one of my favorite sections: A conversation between the main character and his love interest. During a regular interaction (dinner), he explains the concept of deadlocks to her (via io9).

One night I reached for the salt but Lola had already moved it to her side of the table. I looked at her. She was drinking from her glass of water. “Salt,” I said, but she just nodded and kept drinking. She drained half the glass. When she set it down, she picked up a napkin and dabbed her lips. She tapped salt into her soup and handed it to me. I stared. “What?” she said.

“Nothing. It’s just . . . nothing.”

“What?”

I put down the salt. “You locked the salt while performing an unrelated task.”

She blinked. “You mean drinking?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t wait five seconds for salt?”

“I can. But salt is a shared resource. If you’re going to lock it, you should use it as quickly as possible, then release it. You can’t leave it locked while accepting an interrupt.”

“I got thirsty.”

“Then first return the salt to general availability.”

“Just in case you happen to want salt in that five seconds?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me. “Really?”

“Otherwise you compromise the system.”

“What system?”

“The . . .” I waved my hands. “The system.”

“There isn’t any system.”

“Everything is a system. Look.” I leaned forward. “What if I had your water and I suddenly decided I wanted the salt? And instead of giving you back the water I just sat here waiting for you to release the salt, which you didn’t because you were waiting for the water? It’s a deadlock, that’s what. It’s catastrophic system failure. And you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, I could just ask Charlie to give me the water in exchange for the salt.’ But that requires you to understand my resource needs, and violate process encapsulation. It’s a swamp. I’m not saying it’s a big deal. I’m just pointing out that locking the salt like that is incredibly inefficient and systemically dangerous.”

Lola snickered. “You’re insane.”

“I’m not insane. It’s a fundamental principle. You’re insane.”

“Regular people don’t bring fundamental principles to the dinner table.”

“Well,” I said.

We ate. “Explain that again,” said Lola. “That stuff about locks.”

I found this book to be as humorous and entertaining as it was thought-provoking. The author also created this helpful trailer:

Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old. That doesn’t imply that the 10-year-old technologies we might draw from are mature or that we understand their implications; rather, just the basic concept is known, or knowable to those who care to look.
Here’s the message to be heeded: Innovation is not about alchemy. In fact, innovation is not about invention. An idea may well start with an invention, but the bulk of the work and creativity is in that idea’s augmentation and refinement. The newer the idea, the coarser the granularity of most analysis, and the more likely people are to say, “oh, that’s just like X” or “that’s been done before,” without any appreciation for how much work and innovation is involved in taking an idea from concept to wide practice.

Those things do not just happen. It is work and success is a process. An enjoyable book on the subject is Scott Berkun‘s Myths of Innovation. Here is a video lecture of him discussing innovation, creative thinking and ideas presented in the book:

We all like stories. Innovation stories that focus on moments of epiphany can give the impression that it is that moment that is important – rather than the perhaps long time of preparation that led to the moment.

The aforementioned essay presents an interesting perspective. Two sections particularly stood out for me.

Technoculture critic and former Wired contributor Erik Davis is concerned about the proliferation of reviews, too. “Our culture is afflicted with knowingness,” he says. “We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that’s great on many levels. But we’re forgetting the pleasures of not knowing. I’m no Luddite, but we’ve started replacing actual experience with someone else’s already digested knowledge.”

Having more information available is generally preferable to having less. We are in trouble though, if a large amount of information creates, what perhaps amounts to an illusion of knowledge, particularly if that cuts short our own quest for discovery.

Modern search engines as well as large amount of meta information in form of reviews, opinions, etc. provide extremely convenient sources of data and real shortcuts in knowledge acquisition. It is good to learn from other people’s experiences. That however, does not need to be the end. Sometimes, quick answers are more than sufficient, but other times there are real opportunities for deeper inquiry, to “figure it out for oneself.”

There’s an essential freedom in being alone with one’s thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else’s. Diminish that aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective. Do I really think Blue Bottle coffee is that great? Or Blazing Saddles that funny? Do I really not like that pizza place because it isn’t authentic New York-style? Sure, it’s entirely possible to arrive at one’s own opinion amidst a cacophony of others. But it’s also possible to bend, unknowingly and imperceptibly, toward a position not naturally our own.

Knowledge can both empower and constrain. Both is important, but in this discussion that second aspect may be the more interesting one. Every bit of information that we consume about a topic will inform and build our perspective and opinion of it. We will become biased, perhaps in subtle ways, but often quickly. It is important to consider the artificial, mental boundaries that we will build, based on the information available to us.

Like many good quotes, the following is commonly attributed to Mark Twain.

They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!

This can be interpreted more broadly and I think it comes down to the following. Introspection to determine our own biases in a given situation can be an instructive exercise. Sometimes it is a very good thing to ignore or place a lower emphasis on certain pieces of knowledge. Sometimes, one has to dive in deep and experience discovery not because but in spite of any other information that others provided.

Netflix’s streaming selection is large, but there are lots of titles that they only provide as DVD rentals. Earlier this year, I purchased an Apple TV. Among other things it offers the convenience to rent or purchase a movie and then just start watching it, streamed over the Internet. Even though this accrues a (relatively) small extra expense, getting the movie virtually immediately over Apple TV is much more convenient than waiting for a DVD in the mail.

That part is obvious, here is what is perhaps more interesting.

In How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More, Dan Ariely discusses Netflix, among other companies. He explores the question of why Netflix users ended up renting fewer DVDs. The short answer: We are bad a predicting our own, future preferences.

There’s a beautiful paper by Daniel Read and two coauthors showing the gap between what people want to do in principle and what they want to do right now. They asked subjects to choose several films from a list containing a mix of highbrow titles (e.g., Schindler’s List) and lowbrow titles (e.g., My Cousin Vinny). When asked which film they wanted to watch a few days later, most picked a highbrow one. But when asked which they wanted to watch right now, most went lowbrow. In principle, we want to be the kind of people who watch serious movies, maybe even French ones—just not tonight! And so our queue becomes aspirational, filled with titles that are more ambitious than the ones we really want to watch.

The aforementioned paper goes by the title Mixing Virtue and Vice: Combining the Immediacy Effect and the Diversification Heuristic [PDF] and describes the study and the authors’ findings in more detail. It is absolutely worth reading.

I’m guessing there is more to it than just the pleasure/aspiration tradeoff. However, thinking about this a bit more I realize the following. Both my DVD queue and my Instant Queue contain well over 50 items. Whenever I do decide to watch a video these days, that movie is almost never in either queue though. I simply go with whatever I find most appealing at the time. I would like to think that low-brow entertainment is not generally winning over the high-brow variety, but I also have no evidence to prove that.

At times, it does seem as though my adding a movie to a queue can almost make it less likely for me to actually watch it.

Technology Review highlights the movement in The Measured Life, including a feature article of the same title in the magazine’s August print edition. Quantified Self looks like a good blog to follow to keep up with developments in the area. There are also numerous Meetup groups as well as a conference.

Gary Wolf, who wrote about self tracking in Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365 and The Data-Driven Life also gave the following Ted talk:

From the video:

I would like to tell you that it’s also for self-knowledge. The self isn’t the only thing, it’s not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.

I think, people generally like data. The ability to collect and subsequently analyze and view the data, can lead to powerful feedback loops that can help us make better, more informed decisions about how we live.

We will be hearing a lot more about this.

The Turing Test is meant to gauge a machine’s intelligence. The test, as proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, asks for computers to imitate human beings well enough as to believably carry on a conversation with a human, such that the human does not realize he or she is conversing with a machine instead of an actual person.

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition that presents a platform for teams and their chatbots to see how they fare in such an imitation game and to ideally pass the Turing Test. The winner of the Loebner Prize is that bot that is voted to be the most human-like computer.

Brian Christian participated in the 2009 installment of the competition. He did not contribute a chatbot, but rather was one of the human confederates. Just like a software bot, the confederate’s task is of course also to convince the judge of his humanity during their written chats, thus trying to keep them from judging a computer program to seem more human-like than him based on a conversation. As it turns out, being the most convincing human human, has its rewards, too:

But there is also, intriguingly, another title, one given to the confederate who elicited the greatest number of votes and greatest confidence from the judges: the “Most Human Human” award.
One of the first winners, in 1994, was Wired columnist Charles Platt. How’d he do it? By “being moody, irritable, and obnoxious,” he says – which strikes me as not only hilarious and bleak but also, in some deeper sense, a call to arms: How, in fact, do we be the most human humans we can be – not only under the constraints of the test, but in life?

An intriguing question indeed! Competing against software that strives to be as human-like as possible can serve as great motivation to contemplate what exactly it means for a person to come across as a human – other than just being oneself.

Brian Christian’s book The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive examines that question in some depth. Our notion of (artificial) intelligence and valid tests thereof keep changing as computer become able to accomplish tasks that were previously assumed to take real, human intelligence. Chess was a great example of this and so was the game of Jeopardy.

As computers and our capacity to program them and make them smarter improves, the machines appear to be gaining ground. Does that mean it is just a matter of time, until the machines will pass the tests we present or are we able to improve ourselves to stay ahead of them? The author seems to think so:

In an article about the Turing test, Loebner Prize co-founder Robert Epstein wrote, “One thing is certain: whereas the confederates in the competition will never get any smarter, the computer will.” I agree with the latter, and couldn’t disagree more strongly with the former.

The author joined Jon Stewart for a brief segment on The Daily Show to discuss his book, the Loebner Prize and Artificial Intelligence:

It is a brief, but informative conversation. My favorite part occurs around the 2:35 mark. Jon Stewart: “Tell me, how computers have progressed – they’ve been able to, obviously, beat us at chess, and now at Jeopardy … Will they move on … beyond our hobbies? [... or will they always be stuck in these types of games in their capacities?]”

The Most Human Human is a thought-provoking, engaging read – highly recommended.

All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

All three perspectives make an important contribution to the thinking around this and none of them should be ignored. I think this is particularly true, because there really is no turning around anymore: Having introduced new knowledge and technology, once a massive progress has been put into motion, it is not going to be simply undone.

I am counting myself in the Never-Betters camp, for the most part. The above article is an excellent contribution to the discourse though. I am looking forward to learning more, particularly about the Ever-Wasers perspective that emphasizes that similar debates (and struggles) occurred at other times in history in comparable manner, when significant changes were introduced.