People from Wisecrack always manage to put a smile on my face. They give me hope that there are still people of reason in this world. This essay is inspired by that video and the gathering of complementary thoughts.

As an engineer, I stay amazed at what we’re able to create. No one would have guessed that one of humankind’s most fabulous inventions, the internet, along with its biggest hits, could turn into a weapon of mass destruction. I mean ubiquitous mobile access and social networks that gather absurd numbers of people at the same time.

This case is far from the only one, but it works as an example. A few days ago, I was caught off guard by a seemingly small piece of news. James Gunn, the beloved director of two of the MCU’s biggest hits with his Guardians of the Galaxy, was fired over tweets he wrote ten years earlier.

I am not here to judge the merits of the tweets or if his apologies are good enough.

Actually, by just stating neutrality, I am automatically judged as being in favor. This is the problem here.

These days, we’ve seen right-wing pages and accounts deleted from Facebook. It’s part of the platform’s ongoing effort to fight “fake news,” which really is a problem of modern times. News outlets have turned into click-bait factories, exactly as Wisecrack’s video describes.

Who decides what “fake news” is? It “offends” a demographic that is loud and generates clicks. Therefore, we must ban the other side.

It reminds me of a cliche phrase from The Lord of the Rings that always resonated with me. When the fellowship is trying to go through Moria, Frodo laments to Gandalf:

‘What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’

To which Gandalf replies:

‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’

And then concludes:

‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.

For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many — yours not least.’

Back to Gunn, what surprised me was not that those tweets were republished or the public outcry (and of course, no sane person supports the specific contents literally). What really surprised me was the incredible velocity with which a mega-corporation the size of Disney responded with a swift beheading, literally terminating a great career in less than a few hours.

It reminds me of equally quick public sentences without trials or due process. Again, I’m not advocating for these people, but James Damore vs. Google, Brendan Eich vs. Mozilla, and James Watson vs. Nobel.

And most of you or your friends would say, “of course they were ousted, they are bad people, we must police ourselves to remove these villains from our midst.”

Should we?

Can you give back their future if you were wrong? What makes you entitled to be a jury and judge?

Careful. When antagonized, an average, reasonable person should dialogue in private, as any civilized society learned to do. But social networks motivate people to do the worst: call out in public.

This is Mob Formation. This is plain old bullying. I suffered bullying my whole life, being a Japanese minority in a Western country, and I know exactly how much it hurts. That’s why I never bully back.

If you call out someone in public, you’re not practicing “justice.” You are a mere bully. No matter the subject at hand.

Have you ever read the image header of my Facebook and Twitter profiles? It reads:

“I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It.” - Evelyn Beatrice Hall.

And I believe that.

I shall never shame someone in public. Only cowards do that. Shaming someone in the open has the sole purpose of mobbing people, transforming the herd into a maneuvering mass to swiftly perform a public execution, and thus, make your point without having to defend it.

“But I have the right not to be offended.”

No, you don’t.

Another movie I talked about years ago, and cropped a segment to upload on my blog, is Miloš Forman’s masterpiece The People vs. Larry Flynt, produced by Oliver Stone.

It tells the story of the founder of the pornography magazine Hustler. By all means, a despicable person.

But this is precisely the point. Larry did things most of you would condemn. Not just publishing porn, but making satire out of public figures with bad-taste jokes. Jokes nonetheless. The part that really hit me was the idea that people have no right not to be offended. It’s a subjective matter, with no place in court, because we can’t legally define taste.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard a lot today, and I’m not gonna go back over it, but you have to go into that room and make some decisions. But before you do, there’s something you need to know. I am not trying to suggest that you should like what Larry Flynt does. I don’t like what Larry Flynt does, but I do like that I live in a country where you and I can make that decision for ourselves. I like that I live in a country where I can pick up Hustler magazine and read it, or throw it in the garbage can if that’s where I think it belongs.”

Anyone has the right to do and say whatever he or she wants as long as it doesn’t harm the other person. This is a delicate matter because my rights should end where your rights start.

“If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it will protect all of you.” - Larry Flynt.

But because it can’t be decided in court, radical people take matters with their own hands, using the most powerful weapon ever devised: social networks. They can quickly gather a large jury and determine the public execution. It’s like handing a loaded gun to a toddler.

This is Inquisition territory. Galileo was judged and sentenced because he offended Catholic society by stating that the Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun, and not the other way around. It seems stupidly trivial today, but it was a monumental scandal back then. People would rather die than accept that offensive statement. It would be trending on the Twitter of the 1600s, and public execution would be demanded within minutes.

This “I’m offended” justification is what ultimately led to assassinations such as Luther King, JFK, Lennon, the arrest of Gandhi, and the genocide of the Jews. Intolerance.

If not being offended is the ultimate goal, intolerance is the only path, and the murder of Freedom is the worst consequence.

Every atrocity in humankind starts with mob behavior around the “I shouldn’t feel offended.”

That’s the story behind Fahrenheit 451, which Wisecrack explains well. At some point, people just started building echo chambers. Every Twitter feed and every Facebook timeline is, by definition, an echo chamber. You only get content meticulously curated by machine learning, configured to spit out posts that won’t offend you and won’t ever challenge your points of view.

You create and live in a bubble, and you immediately get outraged when your reality is challenged by any thought-provoking idea. You limit yourself to your personalized and narrow status quo.

It’s a lie when you say “I’m open-minded” but keep calling people out and whining about how offended you are. You are not open-minded. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. At least admit the truth: you’re narrow-minded and intolerant.

Contrary to what many of us believe, the internet was supposed to set us free from governments, authoritarian institutions, and big media channels that supposedly controlled the masses’ points of view.

We were supposed to have access to a broader range of knowledge, without borders, without prejudice, and that would help us advance faster into the future, into more innovation.

Innovation, by definition, is a challenge against the status quo. You can’t innovate and please everybody at the same time. That’s impossible. Otherwise, it’s just more of the same.

The invention of fire challenged nature, the invention of heliocentrism questioned God, and the design of natural selection challenged humankind’s soul.

Social networks took a free, decentralized internet and put it on a very tight leash, controlled by “Influencers.” People of pure charisma, with no righteousness and much less wisdom. Charisma is what pulls in huge numbers of followers. The network effect is vicious.

We were supposed to be all together collaborating for the betterment of humankind, regardless of race, geography, and political inclinations.

Be warned, you are all falling for the Eight stages of Genocide. Behold:

1. Classification: People are divided into “them and us”.
2. Symbolization: “When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups…”
3. Dehumanization: “One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases.”
4. Organization: “Genocide is always organized… Special army units or militias are often trained and armed…”
5. Polarization: “Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda…”
6. Preparation: “Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity…”
7. Extermination: “It is ’extermination’ to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human”.
8. Denial: “The perpetrators… deny that they committed any crimes…”

This is the original Nazi modus operandi, and you are perpetuating those steps. I’m not a Jew, but I deeply admire and respect their history and resilience. I’ve been to the official Holocaust Institute at Yad Vashem, in Israel, and to the one in Washington D.C., because I respect the lessons they left behind. It was supposed to be our duty not to let history repeat itself.

But, such is the power of blind ideology and the leadership of charismatic celebrities.

We had charismatic leaders doing good things and bad things, charismatic nonetheless. For every Lincoln or Churchill, we had a Stalin or a Castro.

What’s more difficult is that we can only really know that something went horrendously bad in hindsight, from History. There is no such thing as a black-and-white “good” vs. “evil.” You always think that you are doing an excellent job by following charismatic people who seem to be only promoting the well-being of a minority group.

Ask yourself: are you following a selfless person, one who can treat another with more humanity than they got? Or does it sound more like selfish revenge and payback? Hate is always the stuff of evil. A righteous person does not mimic what they claim to fight against. Anyone advocating “let’s do to them what they did to us” is most probably Evil. You cite people like Gandhi. Did you learn nothing from what he taught all his life?

Every Fidel, every Mussolini, every Hitler, they all really believed that they were fighting for the well-being of their people. Every Nazi acted thinking they were doing the right thing for the future of their sons and daughters, that the sacrifices would pay off. That they were being Noble for killing people.

There has never been a better platform to mob people into irrational herds than now. There are YouTubers out there that have millions of more followers than any Hitler ever had.

And to add injury to misery, we’ve formed the online consensus that people have a magical, inherent right to “never be offended.” They shall not be offended by 200-character tweets. That’s a capital sin, and the perpetrator must die. Apologies are not enough. The thought police have reached the point where one out-of-context tweet is enough to judge and execute a person’s life, without recourse, without parole.

It’s fascinating to see how a series of technologies and innovations supposed to broaden the freedom of everybody would turn to become the most potent weapon of mass destruction ever devised. And it didn’t need a newborn Hitler.

The end of the world doesn’t have to be a catastrophic physical event like a nuclear blast. I think the destruction of the fabric of society itself is even worse. It’s not a big evil dictator that will kill Freedom, it’s the people who don’t deserve it. It’s far more nefarious and can be even more damning.

That’s the lesson: no Omar Bashir, Bashar Al-Assad, or Nicolás Maduro will, alone, be responsible for destroying society.

Every evildoer in history did what they did “in the name of the people.”

And it all starts with “I shouldn’t be offended.”

I’m a longtime proponent of killing gods; it’s practically a hobby. They make excellent fiction characters in bedtime stories, but obviously they don’t exist. Like the boogeyman, Santa Claus, or the Easter bunny. And no, this isn’t another anti-religion article, relax.

For the same reasons, I want to dismantle the myth of “Talent” and bring the demigods back to humanity.

Talent Is Highly Overrated

I really hate the use of the word “Talent.” It should be used as a compliment, a quality, but it’s very often used as an excuse. The Latin root of the word simply means a large amount of money. Today’s mistaken and common use devalues the real efforts of truly “talented” people.

Every time it’s used to denote something like “I’ll never be an Einstein, so I won’t even bother trying.” It’s the favorite excuse of lazy people.

Although environmental and circumstantial factors play a crucial role, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in our biological material, like a gene, that would stop someone from reaching similar levels of success given the same circumstances.

Yes, some people end up, randomly, in the right place at the right time. It’s like winning the lottery. And unfortunately, it’s impossible to recreate the same network of circumstances for everyone and replicate levels of success (more on this at the end of the article).

At the same time, it doesn’t help at all to believe in the mysticism that “talent” can be defined physically, “genetically.” That’s the thinking that creates Josef Mengeles and much of racism and other forms of segregation. There is no predestination.

These days you’ve probably heard of the concept of 10,000 hours of deliberate training to become a master at something, first presented in the book “Outliers” by the prolix Malcolm Gladwell.

From Bill Gates to Oppenheimer to the Beatles, the book tries to describe how these people’s continuous, focused effort, the famous 10,000 hours (roughly 5 years full-time), helps explain their levels of success.

Geoff Colvin, in his book “Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” tries to go further than Gladwell and explains that, obviously, 10,000 hours of training alone isn’t enough if it isn’t “deliberate practice”: obsessive training focused on continuous improvement, above the mere repetition of the same routine.

In summary: do you want the chance to become a master at something? Have the obsession to train focused on improving by millimeters and milliseconds over 10,000 hours. Repeating the same routine, without focusing on improving results, doesn’t take anyone anywhere. It’s just a pastime.

This kind of deliberate training that Gladwell and Colvin detail in their books is one possible factor of success.

10% of the Brain: the Myth

This one is easy to debunk, so I’ll start here.

One of the “mystical” aspects of talent is linked to the belief in people who can activate more than 10% of the brain. The myth that we don’t use all of our “potential.”

Recent fiction films like “Lucy” by Luc Besson don’t help at all because they perpetuate this popular belief. Let’s describe it this way:

“The human brain constitutes 1/40 of the total mass of the human body, on average, but consumes 1/5 of all the calories we absorb. From an evolutionary point of view, where every organ in our body was created and naturally selected over ages for efficiency, having a brain that sucks up 20% of all our daily energy reserve for a mere 10% of efficiency simply makes no sense.”

Think about yourself right now. Are you using your muscles to sit there now? Using your hands to scroll your computer mouse (or finger on your phone screen)? Maybe eating or drinking something? Listening to some music? Breathing? Rest assured, you’re using more than 10% of your brain right now - Nature

With that factor out of the way, let’s continue.

Humanizing Einstein

In general, I don’t respect biographies. I rarely waste my time reading any. I’m not against them, but to me a biography is a story told by a writer, who took into account every technique to keep me hooked on the story he wants to tell. Every biography is limited to the writer’s interests, not the character whose name is on the book’s cover.

In fact, I consider biographies as any other kind of entertainment story. In exactly the same category as watching Captain America or Superman. Because that’s exactly how writers and directors produce “based on true facts” films.

By the way, hats off to the Coen brothers for the film “Fargo” which opens with the line “this is a true story.” And many people, even today, believe it’s real. A trolling of every film that begins with the infamous “based on a true story” while everyone thinks they’re watching facts, not entertainment.

Put in a name that existed, a situation that existed, and everyone associates the entire fiction as if it were real. I hope nobody thinks Lincoln was a vampire hunter because of the film “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”.

But if I were to ask anyone in the world who the greatest super-genius scientist of all time was, with the theories that most revolutionized humanity, no one would hesitate to say: Albert Einstein!

But why?

Physicist Roger Schlafly, in his book “How Einstein Ruined Physics: Motion, Symmetry, and Revolution in Science” brings a ton of evidence to the contrary.

In summary, yes, Einstein really did publish many very interesting things, but the super-inflated myth created around his figure is much more harmful than beneficial for the future of physics and his successors. And it keeps fueling the myth-making market.

Einstein was a person full of flaws, like all of us. A long way from a demigod.

Mark Green, in his article “New Book Says Einstein Highly-Overrated and Ruined Physics” describes:

“What made Einstein so great? The official story goes this way: Albert Einstein, a young clerk in a Swiss patent office, single-handedly transformed physics from a static, three-dimensional science to a four-dimensional, mind-blowing, time-space universe via brilliant and solitary ’thought experiments’ involving gravity, motion, space and time. Einstein also made unprecedented inroads into understanding the nature of light and energy and was the first to comprehend the equivalence between energy and mass. Einstein’s discoveries not only transformed modern physics but the way we view the universe.”

It’s what we all know. And I strongly recommend you read Mark Green’s full article, but let’s get to the points that matter.

E=MC²: was not invented by Einstein!

The equation was published 2 years earlier by Olinto de Pretto. As Schlafly says in his book, “Einstein’s understanding of special relativity … was inferior to (Henri) Poincaré’s.” By the way, if you’ve never heard of the French physicist Poincaré, I recommend reading the book “Chaos: Making a New Science” by James Gleick.

The notion of motion and time as a 4th dimension separate from three-dimensional space.

H.G. Wells speculated about the concept in the famous fiction piece “The Time Machine” in 1894. That same year Lorentz wrote the scientific paper where he “proposes the concept of local time in a moving object.” Poincaré wrote one in 1898 and another in 1900 exploring the relationship between motion and time.

And the relationship of E=MC² to the atomic bomb?

As Schlafly describes, E=MC² isn’t even necessary for the atomic bomb. The equation gives no clue about how to split the atom, or how to create a nuclear chain reaction, or any of the other steps necessary in making the atomic bomb. Relativity isn’t even necessary to understand the energy release of a uranium or plutonium bomb, since the release can be explained by electromagnetism considerations … predictions about relativistic mass were being tested (by German physicist Walter Kaufmann) in 1901, before Einstein wrote anything about it.

And, to top it off, it was also H.G. Wells who first published about the concept of “atomic bombs”.

There were many exceptional scientists, who worked hard, before and during Einstein’s era. The French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré, whom British philosopher Bertrand Russell (remember Russell’s teapot?) called the greatest man France ever produced. The Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate Hendrik Lorentz. And the Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell.

According to Schlafly, Maxwell was the first to coin the term “relativity” and created the first true theory of relativity of mass and energy. Electromagnetism generated the most important equations in the history of science.

Poincaré’s subsequent work on relativity provided the theorems that were “mathematically identical to Einstein’s,” and most of his work came before Einstein. Lorentz and Poincaré had all the main aspects of the theory of relativity, and published before Einstein.

Remember another detail of the “official story.” Einstein worked at a patent office. He understood the importance of “intellectual property” and had access to a lot of work before it had been patented!

And so a talent is born, irreplaceable and of inestimable value … for the mass entertainment market.

Hold onto another detail: what if Einstein hadn’t existed? Would we have been deprived of the Theory of Relativity? No, that work was practically complete before him. Others would have served the role and the media and folklore would just have a different name to call God.

Talent, is relative …

Every Genius Is Actually a Group!

An important fact is that the Theory of Relativity wasn’t the invention of one person. A lone wolf who had a “Eureka” moment. Eureka moments are very different from what you imagine.

Understand that today, the Theory of Relativity is basic material for any physics student. Nothing remarkable.

Everything we have today is the result of hundreds of individuals and groups, who throughout history have used what was known before, thrown away what no longer works, refined what works, and added new pieces for the following generations.

Nothing we do today is truly done “from scratch.” Everything we have at our disposal today makes us orders of magnitude superior, more efficient, faster, than the generation that lived 200 years ago, millennia ago.

We don’t create anything based on absolute truths written in stone millennia ago. Evolution exists because everything is volatile. Everything that has been proving itself correct given years, centuries of scrutiny, becomes the strongest tools to create new things. Engineering, Medicine, etc.

Thanks to that we went from the era of subsistence to agriculture. To the Industrial Revolution. To the Information Age. And to where we’re heading toward the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and so on.

“Talent” is a way of pointing out moments in this continuous and uninterrupted history where society as a whole has been climbing on the shoulders of giants to take longer strides into the future. But no “one” individual was necessarily pivotal. The achievements would be made by someone, but from time to time, we elect a few individuals.

It’s easier to tell the story that way. That’s all. Innovation is always a group effort.

Serendipity, Randomness, and Complex Systems

Unfortunately we, human beings, are terrible at understanding randomness. The world is highly random.

More than Einstein, the scientist who published the most significant work for humanity was Charles Darwin and his magnum opus “On the Origin of Species” where he explains how complexity emerges in a world of random events through natural selection.

I wrote in part about this in the post “Processes, Methodologies, and the Human Brain” from 2013 and in the post “We Are Mathematically Ignorant” from 2008. I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.

The very story of how we survived and evolved in this world, until reaching the humanoid form we have today, is the result of what we had to face in the natural environment, or we wouldn’t be here.

And a crucial factor in our primitive brain is finding patterns, things that repeat, and doing it fast. If, in the dead of night, in the middle of a forest, we see a small pair of shining circles moving around us and don’t immediately connect them to the eyes of a lurking wolf so we can run as soon as possible, we wouldn’t be here.

That same mechanism is what makes us see “faces in the clouds,” “images in coffee grounds,” “the face of Christ on a dirty cloth,” and so on. Identifying patterns amid randomness guaranteed our survival, but in the modern world this capability of our brain leads us to totally wrong conclusions of cause and effect.

That’s why I’ve written so much about “correlation isn’t the same as causation.”

“cum hoc ergo propter hoc”

The real world is “complex,” in the mathematical sense, which describes the exponentiality of results given a network of factors. There is no linear, step-by-step path in anyone’s biography. Not even in twins who were born and lived together, under the same set of factors, at least in theory.

“Complexity” isn’t what we’re used to imagining it is, and it’s what prevents us from predicting the weather more than the short term. It’s what leads to Lorenz’s famous butterfly, Mandelbrot’s fractals, and Chaos Theory. And more recently to Modern Network Theory (including Social Networks) published by authors like Barabási, Strogatz, or Duncan.

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been fascinated by this subject for a decade and have already recommended all these authors’ books. It was even the topic of my first public talk in 2008, “Killing the Average”.

Beyond those 10,000 hours of obsessive deliberate training toward continuous improvement, you also need to be exposed to as many situations and people as possible to increase your chances of “serendipity” which is the combination of “being in the right place, at the right time, and with the capability to seize the opportunity.”

This is what can lead to such “success.” There’s no simple recipe, only hard work and a good dose of randomness. When all these factors align, the results can really seem “miraculous” or “superhuman.” And given enough time and the human habit of inflating stories each time they’re retold, in a few years we create new Demigods.

Killing Gods

In every mythology there are many gods. Both popular manifestations of beliefs around the “inexplicable” facts of nature (at the time) like storms, volcanoes, the seasons, the weather.

And there are also the demigods, human beings who demonstrated some kind of superiority or so-called “miraculous” feats (at the time) that no other human could ever achieve, with a good dose of creativity in telling the story.

Both cases are explainable. Unfortunately the logical explanation is much less dramatic and doesn’t make as good a story, most of the time. Curing diseases and advancing humanity isn’t as “sexy” as a so-called “miraculous” feat.

But our society’s style of mass communication (newspapers, magazines, television, films, social media) loves “sexy stories.” Negative news sells. Sexy sells. Logical facts don’t generate audiences. And, worse, they elevate false myths to the status of “truth.”

“Tell a lie enough times and it becomes truth.” - Joseph Goebbels

Just because you yourself don’t know the explanation for something, the argument that “therefore there is the possibility of something mystical” doesn’t hold. If I can’t explain that your God doesn’t exist, neither can you prove that he does. It’s a fallacious argument and has no place in a serious discussion.

And that’s being nice, because whoever tells the story is the one who carries the burden of proof. Not me, the one listening, who’s required to disprove you.

The last 200 years have been fantastic, because we’ve been killing gods at rates never before recorded in the history of humanity. It’s the reflection of how much we’ve advanced in our knowledge about nature and how it works. There aren’t many left, and we don’t need to keep creating more.

Conclusion

The circumstances of why certain individuals are elevated to the status of demigods isn’t an easy answer. Much less a linear sequence of events. Much less an entertainment film, with high doses of fiction and drama, that claims to be “based on real facts.”

We all live in a complex world, where everything is intertwined in an infinite network of possibilities. Each individual has very different circumstances.

Many have no conditions at all and even so they exceed expectations, with superior determination, with superior dedication, with superior patience, and some really reach success.

“Natural” talent?

Many have the conditions, but don’t have dedication, don’t have patience, don’t have determination. And they fail. How many stories of heirs of great fortunes destroying the legacy of their ancestors?

Lack of Talent?

Everyone has chances. But there’s no point in waiting. The best thing to do is to build the capabilities as soon as possible so that, if randomness arrives and you’re in the right place at the right time, you have the conditions to seize the opportunity and surf on it.

But there are no simple answers, no recipes, no miracles, and no talents naturally born with genius ready and, therefore, unreachable ideals.

Now, if you have the conditions and don’t get success handed to you on a plate, it isn’t the “bad luck” of having been born without the talent gene. It’s pure laziness. Simple as that.

Don’t have idols. Have references.

My language is “faster”. My framework is “more elegant”. My tool is “more productive”. My community is “more friendly”. All bullshitty reasons to choose something because those reasons don’t really matter.

Although DHH did a good job describing the reality of developers’ choices, he didn’t go as far as to explain why we all do it this way. Including himself. Including myself.

The religion framework theory does explain some of the behaviors, I’d go farther still.

Most developers are more akin to sports fans (or fanatics, as is the root of the word “fan”).

Check out some items from the article “Why Sports Fans are Sports Fans”:

• There’s high drama.
• It’s fun to watch greatness.
• It taps into our creepy side that wants to sit in the ancient Roman Coliseum and watch people fight to the death.
• It’s aesthetically pleasing.
• The sports world includes a lot of gossip.
• Sports provides an escape from life.
• It’s a perfect tool for your crippling procrastination tendencies.
• Sometimes I think we might even use sports as a way to attach ourselves to something immortal.
• In a time when heroic triumphs aren’t part of most people’s lives, sports allows us to capture a little sliver of the feeling of glory.

Developer niches feel more like sports teams in competition. There must be “winners” and “losers”. And people cheer over every small victory (like useless synthetic benchmarks or pseudo-statistical and meaningless indexes such as the TIOBE).

Fans of losing teams feel like they need to have increased loyalty to get the utmost reward.

Testosterone levels rise when discussing nonsense over Hacker News. Threads get really deep, each person shooting bullshitty “evidence” to “prove” their point. And every argument has an easy counter-argument, and the threads go on and on indefinitely. And every person writing will never agree to the contrary. And no one will ever switch sides based on the arguments laid out on those threads. Yet, they still waste lots of time writing anyway. Madness.

People - especially young people - like to have a sense of belonging, a sense of deindividuation, dissolved responsibilities. Which is some of what I wrote a couple years ago on the current nonsense trend on functional languages.

As Mike Perry describes in this post the most passionate fans tend to identify themselves as an integral part of the team they are supporting, with some of them – clearly – feeling less responsible for their individual behaviour. When disinhibition is combined with deindividuation – a loss of self-awareness and a sense of diffused responsibility – fans simply don’t care anymore about what anyone else might think or feel. Deindividuation weakens normal restraints without which, fans are more easily influenced by their surroundings; this is when fans start acting – really – weird, in either a pleasant or less pleasant way.

Groups of fans may mob, insult, threat or even riot. Groups provide fans with a sense of anonymity. Being part of a group removes individual accountability and diffuses responsibility. Unfortunately this behaviour appears online just as often as it does in the stadium.

Sports Networker - Read more

Tech conferences are like the weekend sports games. People like to feel validated being in the middle of equal-minded groups.

Same as with sports, developers feel that their “teams” (technologies, companies) are extensions of themselves. Worse, they feel like they describe their personalities. Which is why developers respond so passionately to contrary arguments: it feels like an aggression to their own selves.

“When we look at motivation for following a sport team, group affiliation is one of the top ones,” says Wann. “Identifying strongly with a salient local team where other fans are in the environment — that’s a benefit to social-psychological well-being.”

“The whole idea behind identification is that it’s really part of how we see ourselves and that doesn’t change easily,” says Robert J. Fisher, professor of marketing at The University of Western Ontario, whose research emphasizes the effects of social expectations on managerial and consumer decision making. “If you see yourself as a member of a family, that role doesn’t change. Those types of connections are very long-lasting and very strong.”

Psychological Science - Read More

It’s all a big show, you’re the audience. Just don’t fool yourself thinking that you’ve been “scientific” in your choices.

We are all victims of heavy Cognitive Bias, which blinds us to the truth:

Here’s a great post by Sam McNerney (@WhyWeReason) explaining cognitive bias. This is the phenomenon where all of us only look for what confirms their intuitions and ignore what contradicts their intuitions, what psychologists call confirmation bias. Confirmation bias helps explain why some fans will boo every single referee call against their team and English soccer fans will – still – argue with Germans about whether the ball did or did not pass the line in 1966(!). Fans automatically see the world as they want to, not how it is.

Sports Networker - Read more

More interestingly, the same way with sports fans of losing teams, people find ways to cope. And superstition is one of them.

Superstitions are an integral part of sports, and they may also be yet another way fans cope with their team’s performance.

In ongoing research, Wann and his colleagues are exploring the role of fan superstition. Over half of his 1,000 participants can readily define a superstition or ritual they believe in. Moreover, some are truly convinced that their participation in ritual superstition impacts the outcome, says Wann. The more highly identified with a team the fans are, the more likely they are to believe that superstitions matter.

“It’s a real struggle that sports fans experience,” says Wann. “They so much care about the outcome of the event they have absolutely zilch control over. How do we gain control? We may develop superstitions.”

Psychological Science - Read More

What I always have to say of all the nonsense is:

• If being the “fastest” was really a real concern, we would all be programming in C, as close to the bare metal as possible.

• If being the “most secure” was really a real concern, we would never ever fetch libraries created by unknown, uncertified, untrained people. We would build everything from scratch, by ourselves, every time, and wait through months of heavy testing before ever delivering to production. You know, like the military used to do.

• If being the “most elegant” was really a real concern, we would not be concerned about being the fastest or the most secure, as they usually go in opposite directions.

The craft of an engineer, or any professional for that matter, is being able to choose between different compromises, and keep balancing out. Never blindly committing loyalty to a specific group or way of thinking. Amateurs commit loyalty to someone else. Professionals hold themselves responsible for their own choices, and they compromise.

Scalability, Maintainability, Reliability, every “-ability” we add to the list is a compromise. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You want more, you pay for more. Because every technology is a combination of compromises, you can’t have a clear single winner or loser. Everything will win in some aspects and lose in others.

As Neo realizes in The Matrix: the problem is choice. The problem is always about choice. People don’t like to choose, because that makes them accountable. It’s far easier to make someone else make the choice and just follow, creating the delusion that you made a “rational” choice because “the group” validates it.

After all, “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.”

The reality that you will eventually realize is that you are not required to make “the” choice.

Clear “good guys” and “bad guys” only exist in fairy tales and bed-time stories for children. The world of Adults is defined by shades of grey.

At the end of the day, DHH is right. It doesn’t matter the tech specs of PS4 Pro vs Xbox One S vs Nintendo Switch. It doesn’t matter the amount of teraflops. It doesn’t matter the bandwidth. It doesn’t matter native 4K or checkerboarding 4K. If I like Zelda, I will play in the Switch. If I like Forza I will play an XBox. If I like Uncharted I will play a PS4. And if I can afford it, I will have all of them. If I can’t afford it, I will choose whatever I want to play right now knowing that I can switch to another platform without having to justify myself through tech specs.

Either I subscribe to the Rails Doctrine or to The Zen of Python. It doesn’t matter. Can I play Zelda on it? Otherwise, any “evidence” you think you have to counter argue my choice is utter bullshit. Don’t even try.

But of course, you should use Ruby if you’re a rational developer ;-)

“But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” - Don Draper

One of the great myths of modern society, perpetuated by a torturous daily repetition on social media, is the false “goal” of the “pursuit of happiness.”

On top of that comes the myth of “motivation”. TL;DR: motivation is overrated, far more than it actually deserves.

“People can have two different mindsets, she says. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their talents and abilities are carved in stone. Those with a “growth mindset” believe that their talents and abilities can be developed. Fixed mindsets see every encounter as a test of their worthiness. Growth mindsets see the same encounters as opportunities to improve.” - Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Then comes the repeated mantra of “do what you love.” As I discussed back in 2014, that idea is a petty way of devaluing other people’s work.

“…, the big problem with the ’love what you do’ narrative is that it’s tied to a discourse of happiness that means ‘being on top of the rollercoaster all the time.’ As if a normal, day-to-day, routine life couldn’t be a life of satisfaction. All of that makes this scenario worrying.” - Bárbara Castro - “5 Reasons why ‘do what you love’ isn’t the solution”

In our small big world of tech, this leads many people to conclude: “I’m going to work at a startup or start my own.” The decision by itself has nothing wrong with it. The problem is reaching it driven by the previous myths, which turns into a huge source of unnecessary frustration, as I already explained in 2013.

“I won’t mince words: I am deeply skeptical of this system. I’m skeptical of this system’s slavery, self-congratulatory fetishization of “disruption,” while at the same time becoming so obviously the kind of impassive institution it wants to replace. I’m skeptical of the short-term vision of the startup community. And I’m particularly skeptical of its disregard for the lives of the people who participate in it and the lives of those who live in the world that startups seek to reshape. Let’s not even start to discuss the collusion, cartelization, and other market corruption activities that are so common in the VC world. The point being: it’s a bad game, and a fraudulent game.” - Alex Payne

Add to that the social media “consensus” that the world never stops getting worse. Everything today is supposedly worse. People, worse. Jobs, worse. The environment, destroyed. Everything offends everyone all the time, and nobody can stop judging others.

I disagree, as I’ve explained back in 2013 and repeat every year: the world is better, constantly improving, and the future will be even better. I’d like to take this chance to honor one of the men who helped change my perspective on the world, the recently deceased Dr. Hans Rosling.

The Perpetuation of the Myths

There’s no shortage of books, talks, TV shows, movies, and everything else built around the idea that everyone “must” be happy, all the time. And that if you’re not happy, you’re doing something very wrong. The relentless pursuit of “ideal happiness” has become one of the most unhealthy and cruel obsessions of the past two centuries, right next to the excessive consumption of sugar. That’s another subject, though sugar and happiness do tend to be correlated.

There are 2 concepts everyone needs to understand:

1. You probably don’t have depression. These days everyone “is depressed,” of course, because “figuring out what you love to do” takes a lot of work and brings a lot of “suffering”…

No, you’re just bored, momentarily.

Saying “I’m depressed” instead of “I’m bored” has become so common that the real clinical condition needed another name to set itself apart, “Major Depressive Disorder”. That one is a medical condition, far too serious to be treated with such carelessness.

2. Normally, even after going through events we consider very bad, or very good, we tend to return to the same level of “happiness” (or boredom) we were at before them. This is called the “Hedonic Treadmill”. It’s the main reason the “pursuit of happiness” is such a cruel journey: whoever doesn’t grasp this mechanism lives frustrated all the time.

“When enough is not enough, a Hedonist is born.” - Sukant Ratnakar

Have you ever thought “I’ll finally be happy when I get married.” Or “if I get this job, I’ll feel completely satisfied.” Or maybe you relate more to the other side of the coin: “I’ll never be happy now that I got this medical diagnosis.” Or “I can’t be happy while I have to pay these debts.” Psychological research has revealed two important findings when it comes to these beliefs: The things we think will make us happy never make us happy for as long as we imagine. At the same time, negative life events and challenges don’t have a lasting impact on our happiness either, as we believe they would. - Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D - The Myths of Happiness

“We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.” - Jennifer Hecht - The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn’t Working Today

Because of Hedonic Adaptation, any change seems to supply fresh “motivation,” the feeling that “we’ve finally locked onto the right path.” Unless it brings a new purpose, it’s just more of the same. We soon get used to the “new normal” and drift back to boredom.

Without understanding this, you stay stuck in the endless, unsatisfying cycle of “the grass is always greener on the other side.” The most twisted effect of these myths shows up when a person starts blaming others for their own problems. “I can’t because my husband…”, “I can’t because my family…”, “I can’t because my coworkers…”, “I can’t because my boss…”, “I can’t because society…”

At this point you’re lost. You want changes, but you want everything around you to change, except yourself. That’s the best definition of a coward: living on superficial justifications and excuses to avoid effort, to avoid pain, to maximize short-term pleasure. It’s the behavior of an addict, and judging everything and everyone is the drug.

Only you are destined for great things, but something or someone is holding you back. Only you are special. Only you deserve special treatment. In the old days we’d politely call this “immaturity” or “childishness.” Today I’d say most people actually fit into “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”.

“Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultraconfidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism … (this) causes problems in many areas of life, such as relationships, work, school or financial affairs. You may be generally unhappy and disappointed when you’re not given the special favors or admiration you believe you deserve. Others may not enjoy being around you, and you may find your relationships unfulfilling.” - Mayo Clinic

In the modern world, I’d reduce this to the “Like Culture.” Sad.

Conclusion

This relentless pursuit of “ideal happiness,” this “doing only what you love,” and this certainty that “the world is going to end” make people very weak. Low self-esteem, low empathy, sky-high narcissism, and a sense of “depression” that ends up paralyzing them. In the end, the person just lashes out in every direction, for lack of “purpose” and out of constant frustration with everything and everyone.

Fortunately, I never had this problem. I’ve known people who do, and this article is dedicated to them, as a “wake up call.” That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my unhappy moments and personal crises. I’ve lost a lot, financially and personally. Businesses, friends, relationships. I’m not exaggerating. But I accept my losses and I pay for them, as part of life: No Pain, No Gain.

A “fancy” work environment was never a concern. I once worked under a tarp (!) when they were painting the small office where I was an intern, in summer, with no air conditioning, because they were going to throw a party and the work couldn’t stop. I worked inside a logistics warehouse, with a zinc roof, only a fan, and trucks coming in and out right next to me.

I slept on the office floor dozens of times. I carried furniture down the middle of the street to move offices. I pulled many unpaid all-nighters. I got chewed out for things that weren’t even my responsibility (I was an intern). I did all kinds of things unrelated to my real job, fought with managers, with “coworkers,” with vendors.

I never treated any of this as “the end of the world.” It was just the inevitable. The famous “accept it, it hurts less.”

It’s no accident that I’m an Engineer. An engineer solves problems, and our obsession is always finding a more efficient way to do the same thing. No engineer ever solved anything just by whining.

There’s also no such thing as “work that devalues me.” If I have to crop a Photoshop, I won’t treat it as useless manual labor. There’s no useless work. There’s bad will. Any ordinary, underestimated task, done with your head engaged, can lead to great accidental discoveries.

“The inventor of the Coca-Cola wasn’t a shrewd businessman, a seller of sweets, or a dreamer looking to strike it rich in the beverage business. John Pemberton just wanted to cure headaches. A pharmacist by profession, Pemberton used two main ingredients in his hopeful headache cure: coca leaves and cola nuts. When his lab assistant accidentally mixed the two with carbonated water, the world’s first Coke was the result.” - 10 Awesome Accidental Discoveries

Many of these narcissists, in their aura of self-importance, believe they need the perfect environment, that someone must give them the conditions to achieve great things (emphasis on “give” because they refuse to earn what they need on their own). That’s a load of nonsense. I’ve yet to see anyone who thinks that way achieve anything relevant to anyone.

In my experience, all the great discoveries were born in humble conditions, with people who had a real interest in what they were doing. Only that. Professionals, “craftsmen,” interested in perfecting their own knowledge, who as a consequence came out with great things that benefited more people. You don’t plan something revolutionary. It happens by accident, given the ideal conditions of temperature and pressure at that moment.

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” - by Akita.

I am not a programmer with the goal of one day surpassing Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds. You can do good work without being blindly arrogant. 30 years in, I still have fun with trivial things: a new piece of code that compiles, a configuration that optimizes my GPU, setting up a Raspberry Pi, testing a new language, tweaking my text editor, researching, learning, evolving, and so on. “Doing what you love” is doing these small things well. And “being happy” is a process of trial and error, always in motion, something you win little by little rather than reach as a final destination.

Whoever enjoys the present, what exists around them and within their reach right now, instead of wasting time on “what if in the future…”, is the one with the best chance of doing what others can’t, blinded by the journey of impossible happiness. Constraints lead to Innovation, as I’ve been repeating for years.

“carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” - “Make the most of the (limited) time you have”.

“Whoever lives in the past is a museum. And whoever suffers over the distant future is mentally ill.” - Unknown.

Coincidentally, while I was researching for this post, the Hipsters Ponto Tech podcast came out where I made a small appearance precisely to talk about the topic of Careers in tech.

And reread my old posts mentioned above, related to these topics:

• The World Today Is Very Good! Happy 2013!
• Letter to a Young Programmer Considering a Startup
• Constraints are liberating: less is more
• Don’t Do What You (“THINK”) You Love

TL;DR: Learn how to learn, and make better use of your life.

The trouble is using the phrase as an excuse. It turns into “we don’t need processes, just let people choose,” or “people choose, so we’ll have consensus on everything,” the fallacy of the democratic organization. At bottom, it’s a way to justify not understanding the value of having processes.

Agile, derived from Lean, is entirely based on processes. And the pillar of original Lean (not the derivations like Lean Startup or Kanban) is “Kaizen”, that is, “continuous improvement”.

The idea is that today should be at least a little better than yesterday. What we do is measurable, and because of that we can say that today came out better than yesterday. The principle is simple; the execution, not so much. If you haven’t read them yet, follow the links in this paragraph to understand these concepts.

Now comes the bad part: how do we talk about people? Or, more specifically, about people’s behavior?

Since we’re all “people,” we’re sure we know how people think. And nothing could be further from the truth. We carry preconceived ideas, fallacious, superstitious, and prejudiced, many of them long outdated. From being repeated so often as clichés, we still believe them, the same way plenty of people still believe we only use 10% of our brain or that you can’t have mango with milk.

And we don’t have to guess. Just like with processes, there is a long literature on people: psychology, sociology (which evolved a great deal since the 90s thanks to the study of networks), behavioral economics, among others. It’s impossible for someone from tech to become a specialist in the Humanities, but if the responsibility is to prioritize people, on top of processes, we’d better equip ourselves well enough.

This is a Small Bite because I don’t intend, this time, to go into detail on the subject. I’d rather leave a few books I really like to give some grounding.

Within the tech field itself there are some classics worth reading:

• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco
• The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks
• The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg

From there we can move on to Behavioral Economics and Psychology:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic by Dan Ariely
• The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty by Dan Ariely
• The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo
• Talent Is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
• Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio
• The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

And, more specifically, about the behavior of various agents in groups (network theory):

• Linked, the New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási
• Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts
• Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us by Duncan Watts
• Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven H. Strogatz
• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
• Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven H. Strogatz
• The (Mis)behavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot

Yes, a lot of these books are pretty superficial (none is technical or specialist), but the intent is just to give an introduction to the various areas. Over time, I dropped some that were too superficial, already in the entertainment and self-help category, like Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Clayton Christensen, and Clay Shirky. Even so, some of them are worth reading.

The main thing is the conclusion: contrary to what we usually think, we, people, aren’t as rational as we’d like, and our behavior is heavily influenced by external agents and by the environment.

I’m guilty too, addicted to arguing about serious subjects and irrelevant ones alike. It’s part of the entertainment, I guess, but I’ll admit that sometimes I just run out of patience. Anyone who watched my more recent talks will remember the part where I say this: people look for “validation” of their ideas and arguments. It seems that the more people agree, the more valid the idea supposedly is, the so-called “democratic” process where 50% + 1 guarantees victory.

There are several problems with this, and I already discussed part of the topic in Mea Culpa: Democratic Organizations Don’t Work. Although I’m not a formal, working mathematician, my foundation is mathematics. One of the good things I remember from my time at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics at USP was precisely the heavy mathematical foundation I was put through. To this day I bring what I learned into my daily life.

Laws Are Laws

The first big thing I learned is this: given a set of axioms, and given that a certain theorem is proven, I can use that tool with the guarantee that it will always work within the stipulated premises.

So, given that natural numbers exist, given x belonging to the naturals and given the algebraic properties of the naturals, I know that y = x + x and that y will be in the naturals. With that, I can say with full certainty that 2 + 2 is 4 and will always be 4.

That matters because I don’t need a majority’s “validation” to know it. It doesn’t matter if someone proposes a vote and 1 million people say 2 + 2 is 5. Quantity of opinions doesn’t undo Algebra. Certain areas of scientific knowledge have been fully proven, and they don’t depend on the consensus of “opinions.”

Majority and authority mean nothing within that context.

This gives me several certainties. There’s an entire body of scientific knowledge across the most different areas, from mathematics to physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and medicine, that is trustworthy and at our disposal. And using it doesn’t depend on consensus, on voting, or on the “validation” of any group.

It also gives me the certainty that just because I don’t know something, that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t already know it, and it raises my esteem for proper research into that body of knowledge. The error is being too lazy to do that research and assuming that because some majority said something, or because someone with apparent authority said something, it “must be true.”

To me, by definition, everything is wrong until it’s rigorously proven to be true, by the same methods that guaranteed that body of scientific knowledge.

First World Problems

In the self-help world there are thousands of “formulas,” or “recipes.” Recipes to lose weight, for success, to be happy, and so on. It’s an enormous industry that, at least by 2010, was moving around USD 11 billion. It won’t stop and should grow.

We move along Maslow’s pyramid. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation still had to worry about the most basic survival: food, health. In this new generation, a huge portion of the population lives much better, and that base is no longer the biggest priority.

But human beings will always look for problems to worry about, the famous “first world problems”. Sometimes it seems we’re a species built to find problems even where they don’t exist.

That’s why the self-help market grows so much, and why problems that seemed not to exist a few centuries ago now seem so much bigger: depression, stress. Medications that were never so needed 2 or 3 centuries ago are now manufactured by the ton: Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Celexa.

For the record, I’m not belittling these problems. A huge portion is quite real, and thankfully modern medicine has the instruments to treat it. Still, it’s undeniable that a lot of people make bad use of that circumstance, since unlike a broken leg, there’s no physical evidence of this kind of problem.

I bring it up because it’s already part of our culture to assume this kind of pathology is a common thing. With each new generation, it seems everyone is made of crystal and any small disruption already breaks them. The impression is that if this generation were magically transported to the 17th century or earlier, no one would survive.

The Effect of Self-Help

All that said, here comes the part that bothers me most: the magic formulas, the silver bullets. Within the self-help market, I don’t mind that much. After all, what harm is there in someone reading “Who Moved My Cheese” to entertain themselves?

The problem is when pseudo-science gets taken as real science.

It’s what I call “because it worked for X it must work for Y,” or what plenty of people have heard me repeat ad nauseam: “correlation is not causation”.

All self-help is one or more formulas, duly wrapped in heavy marketing and sold as universal solutions.

“Just think positive.”

On their own, statements like that are harmless, but they quickly unfold into biblical proportions.

What’s the problem with formulas? Again I go back to my mathematical foundation. A mathematical formula, on its own, is useless: it’s undefined, incomplete. To be completely defined, it needs at least two more elements, a Domain and an Image. For example, look at the formula:

f(x) = 1/x

Immediately someone could say “but this formula is wrong, because if x is zero the calculation doesn’t work.” It’s a good observation, but it starts from a premise: that x can be any number that exists.

But if I define it correctly and say:

given x belonging to the domain of real numbers, and given x different from zero, f(x) = 1/x, will result in the image of real numbers

Now this formula, in the field of Algebra, is well defined and undisputable. Notice what I did with this simple example: I gave an incomplete formula and immediately generated a discussion about it. That’s exactly what happens in every social media discussion and every self-help topic.

To repeat: all self-help is one or more formulas that don’t define the domain or the image. Each person who reads that incomplete formula tries to complete it with their own domain, “for me it works” or “for me it doesn’t work,” and we’ve just found the simplest origin of every flame war, every hater, and every internet troll.

On the other hand, we also find the first way to distinguish an invalid formula from a “possibly” valid one. With the invalid one, you’ll have enormous difficulty defining the domain. We always start from the largest domain, the one that would work for everyone in every scenario. The formula breaks on the spot, so we start reducing that domain and, invariably, it shrinks until it reaches a single case that once worked.

Complex Systems, Biographies, and the Fallacy of “Evidence”

And normally the formulas really do reduce to a single individual. That’s the case with every biography: the sequence of events a certain individual went through, only they went through, and it doesn’t repeat.

I’ve been talking about complex systems for a long time, since at least 2009 the subject has caught my attention. I’ve fallen into the trap of deriving theories about the concept, but I’ll admit that so far I haven’t succeeded. In fact, the whole field of sociology and network studies is still in its infancy in this kind of knowledge, with little in the way of postulates and laws. So handle this kind of subject with far more care than usual.

Quantum physics has also been unduly exploited in the self-help world. Look at calamities like “What the Bleep Do We Know” to understand how to turn a serious subject into a joke (that plenty of people think is serious).

At the risk of being superficial, I’ll summarize the relevant part like this: in the real world, we’re all part of a complex adaptive system. An action I take can trigger several others, which in turn trigger several more, and many of them interact with each other, creating a network of incalculable nodes and connections.

It’s practically impossible to determine the end of a chain of events in a network with countless variables. I say “practically” because we still don’t know how to determine all the variables of the equation, and for all practical purposes that makes any prediction impossible.

Of course, given certain limits of space, time, and error margins, we can predict plenty, enough to send rockets to Jupiter with precision. On the other hand, there are many cases whose error margins are still hard to control, and meteorology itself is an example.

That’s where the idea comes from that a butterfly flaps its wings in China and a tsunami hits Rio de Janeiro. The butterfly didn’t cause the tsunami. It was only an initial condition of an intricate chain of events that happened to result in it.

Now, given a certain result, in many cases we can look backward and trace the chain of events back to the initial conditions. Anyone who watched CSI or some detective show knows we can collect evidence and use deduction to connect events back to a point of origin.

That’s how all “formulas” are created. The chain of events has already happened and won’t change anymore, because within our Universe the past is immutable and time only has one direction.

George Santayana once said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we take what I’ve said so far literally, we’ll conclude that History rarely repeats itself. Just because the initial conditions and the result resemble those of another event, the chain in between is rarely the same. Reading it as “History repeating itself” is coincidence and a series of tricks our brain plays all the time, including confirmation bias.

I know this stretch can get complex, but the point is this: just because something happened once, that doesn’t mean the same chain will happen again.

The initial conditions and the chain of events are that restricted “domain” of the “formula” I mentioned above. And as Duncan Watts would say, everyone fools themselves all the time with the concept of “obvious.” Today it seems obvious to say Facebook is a success. But in 2002 no one could have predicted that in 2012 there would be this Facebook thing and that its IPO would open with a valuation of USD 104 billion. After the fact, we can try to trace the events backward and find the initial conditions and the chain that made it possible. Never before.

Empirically, out of everything I’ve seen offered as a silver bullet, the “best formula” looks very good, until you start to question it: “it looks like a Formula that leads to a good result (Image), but what are the necessary initial conditions? What is the Domain of this formula?”

And when you start to question that, the theory doesn’t hold up for 1 second. Take Lean Startup, the tech world’s fashion. Look at Eric Ries’ initial conditions: you’ll find examples of Groupon, Intuit, and HP, companies that are anything but “small startups,” but the book is evangelized to every small entrepreneur. There’s a clear contradiction of initial conditions, and the scientific method is very different from what the book suggests.

“But there are several good examples of small startups that followed Lean Startup and did well.” And here’s another lesson anyone who watched CSI knows how to spot: a contaminated crime scene is useless. In none of those cases can you say the “cause” of success was using Lean Startup. There may be a “correlation,” and a small one, because we’re talking about a complex adaptive system.

Did the butterfly “cause” the tsunami? The probability is very small. But then marketing comes in. As Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister, would say, “the bigger the lie, the more they’ll believe it,” or the derivative of that, “repeat a lie enough times and people will believe it’s true.”

As Carl Sagan would say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And that depends on exhaustive work of testing to break the hypothesis. A medication, made seriously, takes years, sometimes decades, to reach pharmacies, but silver bullets go viral in a matter of hours or days. Depending on who speaks and how, it gains the status of “unquestionable truth” very fast. Any prosperity-gospel preacher can tell you that.

Just because it “seems” to have worked for 1, 2, 10 cases, that isn’t enough to make something true. Charles Darwin’s “Theory” of Evolution of species has tons of concrete, solid evidence, has been questioned, attacked, and meticulously torn apart for more than 150 years, and for all practical purposes is already close to an absolute truth. Even so, it still hasn’t earned the status of “Law.” If it hasn’t, why would something far less tested deserve it?

Conclusion

In practice, unless it’s part of the body of scientific knowledge already recognized and exhaustively documented, everything else is questionable, should be questioned, and should never earn the dogmatic status of “truth,” by definition.

Self-help is pseudo-science, by definition.

Formulas that guarantee a certain “result” (Image) without a Domain are incomplete and undefined, and that will necessarily split opinions, because each person has their own domain. And just because a group is bigger than whoever is questioning it, the formula doesn’t become true. The opposite would be following Goebbels’ doctrine.

And what actually is proven science needs no quorum, majority, or “validation.” 2 + 2 will always be 4, no matter who wants to argue otherwise.

A tip: for any subject that crosses your path, use Google. Put the term next to the word “debunked” or “skeptic,” “fake,” or “scam,” and you’ll find the answer. For example, search for “The Secret Debunked” and see how much has already been published taking down the so-called “Law of Attraction”. I do this all the time. Nothing is unquestionable, no matter who’s saying it.

Since childhood I’ve been a strong defender of destroying pseudo-science, because it causes more harm than almost anything else. Remember that coincidences happen, and they aren’t so rare.

There’s a branch of research known as “Behavioral Economics,” a strand different from traditional Economics. Classical Economics starts from the premise that people are rational and decide based on cost-benefit analysis. Behavioral Economics factors in the social, cognitive, and emotional forces that shape our day-to-day decisions.

We like to believe we make rational decisions all the time, but most of the time we’re guessing and deciding on emotion. And that produces some fascinating results. One of the best-known researchers in the field is Prof. Dan Ariely, author of the book “Predictably Irrational.”

In the book he looks at how we see prices, why price isn’t a simple matter of “supply and demand,” why we’re dishonest, and how the placebo effect works. It’s the result of years of empirical experimentation.

Watch this excerpt I subtitled from his TED talk on the subject:

Why does this matter? Because we deal with people every day. We make decisions influenced by others or, worse, that will affect others. And we sleep with a clear conscience, convinced we picked the best rational option with the data we had on hand.

But what if our decisions aren’t that rational after all? What if we’re easily influenced by data and circumstances? Better yet: what if recognizing this fact helps us understand our limitations and actually decide better?

That’s why it’s worth understanding your own psychology. Anyone in a management position needs it more than most, because the job itself is already “managing people.”

We are irrational, predictably irrational. Use it to your advantage.

The human brain is a fantastic machine, and saying that is basically a redundancy of the term. But there are many anecdotes and mysticism when people talk about it.

Everyone has at some point discussed the separation of “Emotion” from “Reasoning.” Since the time of Plato, emotions have been seen as something that gets in the way of logical thinking. Worse: most people believe that, at least in the most important decisions, we’re capable of setting emotions aside. The idea is to think according to classical economics, based on facts, evidence, and cost-benefit.

But in the vast majority of cases, that’s not how we behave. When we go to the supermarket, we rarely stand there doing arithmetic, weighing each product’s ingredients or nutritional value. Usually we look at a product and decide whether to buy it based on how we feel.

Among dozens of brands for the same type of product, we choose based on past experiences, on some memorable event, on memories, and all in fractions of a second. We prefer to buy an “80% light” product over a “20% fat” one, even though both phrases say the same thing.

Antonio Damasio is a well-known neurologist who studies the brain and our behavior. He followed patients who literally lost the ability to have emotions because of brain damage, whether from a tumor or a genetic problem. We might imagine, as the philosopher Plato did, that a person without emotions would make the best decisions all the time, since they wouldn’t be influenced by them.

But without emotions, these people can’t learn. Any trivial decision becomes a cost-benefit analysis. Everyday choices like what clothes to wear, what TV channel to watch, tea or coffee, all the mundane things we decide almost instantly, can take hours before this type of patient reaches a conclusion.

A fact we already know: all emotions, sadness, compassion, joy, depression, pleasure, are chemical reactions in the brain. And we already know how to influence or control many of them.

Drug users know the sensation of pleasure. People who take antidepressants do too. They’re all chemicals that act on the brain and modify our emotions. Schizophrenia and Parkinson’s, on the other hand, are damage to this chemical system.

Another fact is that our brain evolved to learn. We learn through trial and error. We learn by observing and inferring patterns. Emotions strongly influence our decisions, and that’s good.

When we learn some pattern, dopamine is released in the brain and creates a sensation of pleasure. We like to discover the pattern of things and to try to predict future events.

Take an experiment with monkeys: we ring a bell and then give a banana. The monkey learns the pattern “after the bell comes the banana.” You can measure dopamine being released the moment the bell rings, because the monkey starts to anticipate that event.

If we turn on a light, ring the bell, and then give the banana, the monkey learns that the “light” event precedes the bell and then the banana. The pattern can be repeated with several stages, and the monkey learns it. But if we follow the pattern and the banana doesn’t come at the end, the monkey gets sad, because the prediction failed.

We also work this way.

For many simple events, with few variables, this works well. Perhaps that’s why many like routine, where the results are well defined.

Our brain, however, has a flaw: in its eagerness to find patterns, it tries to fit them where they don’t exist. That’s how superstitions are born. Before we understood meteorology, primitive tribes thought “it’s raining” was tied to a dance they had just done, and imagined that repeating the dance would bring the rain back.

I translated on my other blog a Scientific American article showing how we are “mathematically ignorant.” We try to find a pattern for everything. A passage that illustrates our superstitions and explanations about coincidence is this:

It’s always possible to combine random data and find some regularity. A very well-known example is the comparison of coincidences in the lives of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, two presidents with 7 letters in their last names, and elected 100 years apart, 1860 and 1960. Both were assassinated on a Friday in the presence of their wives, Lincoln at the Ford Theater and Kennedy in an automobile made by Ford. Both assassins have 3 names: John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, with 15 letters in each full name. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and ran to a theater, and Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and ran to a kind of warehouse. Both successor vice presidents were Southern Democrats and former senators named Johnson (Andrew and Lyndon), with 13 letters in their names and born 100 years apart, 1808 and 1908.

But if we compare other relevant attributes, we fail to find coincidences. Lincoln and Kennedy were born and died on different dates (day and month) and in different states, and none of the dates are 100 years apart. Their ages were different, as were their wives’ names. Of course, if any of these had matched, they would be on the list of “mysterious” coincidences. For any person with a life reasonably full of events, it’s possible to find coincidences between them. Two people meeting at a party often find shocking coincidences between them, but what they are – birthdays, hometowns, etc. – aren’t predicted in advance.

The real world is full of randomness, and it isn’t hard to find patterns in it. Actually it’s very easy. Complex situations have many random aspects, more than we imagine. And our brain hasn’t evolved enough to feel comfortable in a totally random world.

An example is successful people. Imagine a mega-investor like Warren Buffett. Books upon books get printed, with analyses, biographies, and theories, trying to explain the process that takes an ordinary person to earning billions on the stock exchange. Just as speculation: what if Warren Buffett is nothing more, nothing less, than a statistical accident?

Nassim Taleb explains this in a Malcolm Gladwell article:

Suppose that there were ten thousand investment managers out there — which is not an outlandish number — and that every year, entirely by chance, half of them made money and half of them lost money. And suppose that every year the losers were tossed out, and the game replayed with those who remained. At the end of five years, there would be three hundred and thirteen people who had made money in every one of those years, and after ten years there would be nine people who had made money every single year in a row — all out of pure luck. And who’s to say Buffett isn’t one of those nine?

Our brain takes pleasure in looking for patterns in everything, especially in success stories. We want to find the recipe, the magic formula. Sometimes we get that feeling of “what does he have that I don’t?”

Sometimes two people are technically equally capable, but one gets rich and the other doesn’t. The difference can simply be randomness. “But that isn’t fair!” you complain. The world wasn’t made to be fair. Justice is a human concept, and reality has no sense of morality: it simply “is.”

Science, fortunately, has a procedure to avoid this trap of the brain: the scientific method. Everything can start with one of these misfirings, thinking it found a pattern and generating a theory. Now that theory has to be put to the test.

For it to become a good theory, we need not only to try to prove it but, mainly, to try to disprove it. And even if we don’t find a way to disprove the hypothesis, that doesn’t make it a “Law.” Science is very careful with the claims it makes.

Even if a theory works well a thousand times, a single failure is enough for it to be rejected. It’s thanks to this way of thinking that we have solid and reliable foundations in science, free of superstition and mysticism.

Processes, Methodologies, and Superstitions

I gave that whole explanation to get to the main topic of this blog: project and people management. Anyone following my posts noticed that at no point do I preach a methodology, a process, a cookbook recipe. Things like “how to make correct estimates” or “how to predict the success of a project.”

If you’re well informed, you know there’s a whole market of individuals and companies that try exactly this: to sell you processes and methodologies. Whether traditional Software Engineering, PMI, or the so-called “Agile methodologies.”

First I need to leave a warning: all these methodologies were thought up with the best of intentions. The idea was to share the factors that led a certain project to success.

My explanation is more or less this: the leaders of these projects, or rather, their brains, tirelessly start looking for patterns. Maybe it’s the post-it on the wall. Maybe the kind of document used. Maybe the way people sit at the table.

All of this forms a set of “pseudo-truths” that the brain understands as the “lights” and “bells” that lead to the “banana.” These leaders apply the recipe to other projects and, as Nassim Taleb explained, succeed consecutively.

Eureka! It seems we found the formula for turning iron into gold! Quickly these pseudo-truths get formatted as methodologies, canned, packaged, and sold.

But think for a moment: what if all these methodologies are exactly like the rain dance? As I said, it’s very easy to find patterns in randomness.

When we start discussing minutiae, what level of detail to make an estimate at, what metrics to use, what mechanisms for team communication, I can’t help thinking of primitive tribes discussing “What feathers should we wear? What colors on our face? Should we take long or short steps in the dance?”

But the main question never comes up: is the rain dance the thing that actually makes it rain? Or, in our case, is the methodology the thing that actually takes the project to success?

And the scientific method? The problem is that a “project” is a very complex situation. Even the smallest projects are complex, in the sense that they have more variables than it’s possible to measure.

One way to test a theory is to run a double-blind experiment, like drug labs do: one group receives the real medication and another receives a placebo, without knowing. If both have approximately the same result, the drug doesn’t work.

But a methodology is more complicated than a drug. Even if we create two isolated and identical work environments, put two groups of “approximately” similar people in each, start at the same time and with the same requirements, one side with methodology “A” and the other with “B,” we still have no way to compare the results.

That’s because methodologies involve the micro-decisions and capabilities of each person, and “approximately similar” is very different from “equal.” It’s impossible to duplicate the same group of people in each environment.

We would first have to successfully clone the people. Then, with exactly identical groups, we could run a double-blind experiment. But that’s impossible.

The conclusion is that proving a methodology of this type as “correct” is impossible, just as it’s hard to disprove it. So it’s useless to try to claim they work or not. Of course they influence, and separately, each technique can be tested more carefully. But I don’t think it’s possible to scientifically claim that they work.

“But I tested methodology X on my project and it worked!”

Excellent, good for you. But for every project that succeeded with a certain methodology, you can find a case where it went wrong.

And the individuals and consultancies that sell these methodologies are clever: if the project worked, it was thanks to the methodology; if it went wrong, it’s because the people didn’t follow the methodology as they should have. The methodology is never at fault. It’s excellent rhetoric for building a sales argument.

And since people aren’t used to evaluating things rationally, and as I explained, most of the time they don’t reason at all, we’re left with lots of consultants making a lot of money without having to commit to results.

That matters because many people believe that, with the help of the fashionable methodology, simply applying it to a team of nothing but inexperienced people will make a good result appear, as if what mattered were the process and not the people. The opposite happens.

Most of the time these methodologies don’t describe the exact qualifications each member needs to have, because it’s impossible to list them all. At most they offer vague descriptions of “roles,” which generate more discussion than answers. A project with a chance of succeeding starts with at least some very experienced people, capable of guiding the rest of the team.

Anyway, my recommendation: study the so-called “methodologies,” because, as I said, some techniques there have value. But understand that none of them represents the truth.

And there’s no point in adding two half-methodologies together thinking it makes them “more complete.” Projects are executed by people, human behavior is hard to predict, and the real world is full of unpredictable variables, forming a complex system with a lot of randomness involved.

Start by accepting that the world is random and beyond your control. In complex situations it’s better to err sooner than later, because errors bring information that helps refine the next decisions.

Accept that predicting the future in a complex system is impossible, and adapt: some things will go as planned and others will need to change. Maybe some unforeseen feature will need to be built, and the deadline will have to stretch. Maybe some planned feature wasn’t so necessary after all and can be dropped. That’s how you deal with a complex and unpredictable environment: adapting.

Biology explains it: all living beings on the planet are the result of a constant sequence of trial and error. Nature isn’t “perfect,” in the sense that there is no creator, no intelligent design, no grand plan, no destiny. Every living being came from a very bad biological draft that, little by little, via natural selection, discarded what didn’t work and favored what did.

We humans carry biological leftovers, like the appendix. We are a product in constant evolution, and for plenty of things the current stage is “good enough.” In terms of a project, that’s exactly the point where it can be launched: when it’s “good enough,” still with rough edges to fix, but working overall.

Trial and error. Adaptation. Evolution. That’s how you manage anything.

If you want a more detailed view on this topic, I recommend starting with the following books:

• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
• Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb
• The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

As incredible as it sounds, there is no good, simple, clear, short definition for what it means to be a “manager.” Manager isn’t a profession. You can’t “learn” to be a manager in a school or a course. The only way to learn is by trying, erring, and improving, continuously and indefinitely.

One of the best definitions I’ve found is from no one less than Professor Henry Mintzberg, in his recent book “Managing,” published in 2009. A mature and light read.

I recommend the read. If you’re a beginner manager, or want to be one, maybe the book gives you some sense of what’s coming. If you’re already a manager, you’ll be surprised. So many theory books paint scenarios you’ve never seen in practice, and they leave you second-guessing whether you’re on the right track. This one does a better job of naming the real problems you deal with day to day.

I want to bring a few excerpts from the first half of the book.

Management Isn’t a Profession

After years of seeking Holy Grails, it is time to recognize that managing is neither a science nor a profession; it is a practice, learned primarily through experience, and rooted in context.

It is certainly not a Science. Science has to do with developing systematic knowledge through research. That’s nowhere near the purpose of management, which has to do with helping get things done in organizations. Management isn’t even an applied science, because that’s still science. Management certainly applies science: managers need to use all the knowledge they can. And they certainly use analysis, rooted in the scientific method (which means here more scientific proof than scientific discovery).

But effective management is more dependent on art and is especially rooted in craft. Art produces “insight” and “vision,” based on intuition (Peter Drucker wrote in 1954 that “the days of the ‘intuitive’ manager are numbered.” Half a century later, we’re still counting.) And craft has to do with learning from experience — working things out as the manager moves forward.

So it’s worth repeating what Mintzberg often says: it’s impossible to form managers in school. That much is a certainty. In school you learn accounting techniques, marketing, repeatable technical knowledge. None of that makes a manager, much less a leader.

When a school or an MBA course slaps “We Form Leaders” on the brochure, it’s lying. Those schools form technicians. Those technicians go work in technical activities until they grow, take on responsibilities, and maybe, one day, actually manage something.

Management Is a Practice

Put together a good portion of craft with the right touch of art along with some use of science and you end up with a job that is, above all, a practice. There is no “one best way” to manage; everything depends on the situation.

It isn’t even a Profession. It has been pointed out that engineering also isn’t a science or an applied science so much as a practice in its own right. But engineering applies a good portion of science, codified and certified as to its efficiency. And therefore it can be called a profession, meaning it can be taught before practice, out of context. In a way, a bridge is a bridge, or at least iron is iron, even if its use has to be adapted to the situation at hand. The same can be said of medicine. But not of management:

Many medical diagnostic, inference, and treatment skills … assume that a disease can be decomposed into separate problems that don’t differ much between patients and can be treated by reasonably standard remedies … In contrast, much of management work involves dealing with problems that are highly interdependent with other parts of the organization, are specific to this particular firm, market and industry and not easily reducible to a standard general syndrome that can be treated by specific techniques.

Managing is a work of negotiation, of trades, of yielding, of conquering. There’s no procedure, no methodology, no rigid body of knowledge that defines this role. You can’t know “what level” a manager is at because there’s no “standard” for comparison. There are good managers and bad managers, just that. “Bad managers,” in reality, couldn’t even be called “managers” because they’re actually not managing.

Real Management

It has been said that an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally he or she knows everything about nothing. The manager’s problem is the opposite: to know less and less about more and more until finally he or she knows nothing about everything.

Many people think that taking a pile of courses, postgrad, MBAs, and the like will necessarily turn them into good managers. That correlation doesn’t exist. Yes, there are excellent managers with good training, but what really formed them was practice. Correlation isn’t causation. In the general case, this person is just postponing the thing that would actually give them a shot at becoming a good manager: practice.

Managers who don’t do and deal, and so don’t know what is going on, can become incapable of coming up with sensible decisions and robust strategies.

There’s also the idea that managers shouldn’t get their hands dirty, since it’s either they manage or they execute. That doesn’t mean the manager can be ignorant about the area where they work. Quite the opposite: a manager with excellent technical knowledge of their area has a better shot at understanding the context.

Thinking is heavy — thinking too much can exhaust a manager — while acting is light — acting too much can make the manager unable to stop.

Similarly, too much leadership can result in a job without context — without aim, without focus, without action — while too much relationship can produce a job disconnected from its internal roots — public relations instead of tangible connections. The manager who only communicates never finishes anything, while the manager who only “does” ends up doing everything alone. And the manager who only controls risks ends up controlling an empty shell of yes-men and yes-women. We don’t need people-oriented, information-oriented, or action-oriented managers; we need managers who operate on these three planes. Only together, across all three planes, do these roles provide the balance that is essential to the practice of management.

Mintzberg points out something obvious: if you want to be a renowned management author, writing books and giving talks, you have to focus on a single aspect and exalt it as the “missing piece.” But in reality, a manager who focuses on only one aspect of the practice is certainly doing the wrong thing. A good manager balances the different roles as the situation demands, and uses all of them whenever needed.

Anyway, as you can see, the role of the Manager is much broader than it seems. Just studying procedures doesn’t make you a manager, just as studying a color table doesn’t make you a painter, or knowing how to read a score doesn’t make you a composer.

Art, Craft, Technique, and Practice. This is the definition of Management. A manager who doesn’t understand that will always be a terrible manager.

As an addendum, one word of caution. Sometimes we see very active professionals, and not only managers, who seem to do a lot because they talk to a lot of people, act a lot, and are always running hot. That’s usually the symptom of the “hero-professional.” In my definition, it’s precisely the person who is doing the job the wrong way. They look productive, but in practice they’re just being inefficient and, worse, cleaning up the mistakes they generate along the way. It looks like they’re solving plenty when, in fact, they’re just chasing their own tail.

On different levels, we consider ourselves “rational animals.” We understand our ability to reason as the characteristic that separates us from other animals.

In this world of startups, we spend our days trying to answer a hard question: “How do I demonstrate the value of my product to the world?” Is it the cheapest? The easiest to use? The most elegant?

To get to the root of the problem, it helps to go back a few centuries and then move forward to what we know today about how we reason.

"I think, therefore I am"

Almost everyone has heard and repeated this phrase at some point in life, usually with dubious interpretations, but few stop to reflect on what it means. The phrase is by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, a man who doubted and questioned everything, including his own senses, since they had fooled us countless times. At the very least, the act of questioning, of thinking, defines the only certainty we can have: that we exist.

The name Descartes, in Latin, is “Cartesius,” from which the word “Cartesian” comes. It names Descartes’ philosophy, the “Cartesian Dualism”, the complete separation between mind and body. The idea is that “the intangible soul exists despite the material body.” It’s the entry of mathematical thought into philosophy, with the proposal that all possible knowledge can be deduced purely through reasoning, regardless of the body, the senses, and the emotions.

Let’s jump from the 17th century to the 19th and meet another name: Phineas Gage, a US construction worker still remembered today for an unusual episode. An explosion at a railroad work site launched a huge iron rod, about 3 cm in diameter and weighing 6 kg, which entered under his left jaw, passed behind his left eye, pierced his brain, and exited through the top, leaving a hole in the top of his skull.

The force of the explosion threw the rod 25 meters away. Gage stayed conscious, even while literally leaking brain from the hole.

What makes the case interesting is that Phineas survived and lived another twelve years. According to reports from the time, though, the person before the accident and the one after were completely different.

Those reports aren’t reliable, but they describe the Gage before the accident as “balanced, meticulous, and persistent about his goals, besides being a responsible and skilled professional.” After the accident his personality changed, “he was belligerent, ill-tempered, lazy, and irresponsible. He became impatient and stubborn, using coarse language he had never used before.”

"Phineas was no longer Phineas."

This episode can be considered the catalyst for modern neuroscience and its effects on psychology, sociology, and even behavioral economics. The Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this case in his famous book “Descartes’ Error”.

"I feel, therefore I am."

Modern neuroscience has already knocked down the old Cartesian notion of separation between mind and body. Today we know that the body influences the mind. For the purpose of this explanation, let’s simplify our emotions as the expression of the physiological state of the body and brain, affected by stimuli. Anyone who has used legal or illegal drugs, Prozac, Zoloft, LSD, or who went through hormonal anomalies, knows the devastating effect this has on their own definition of “SELF.”

Damasio’s hypothesis is that the region damaged in Phineas was the left prefrontal cortex. This is one of the foundations of the “Somatic Markers Hypothesis”, which proposes that our decision-making, far from being purely rational and Cartesian, is guided by emotions.

Research on several people who, like Phineas, suffered damage to the neocortex region shows problems with decision-making and social conduct. They have difficulty planning for the long term, learning from their own mistakes, and behaving in a socially acceptable way.

"A man always has two reasons to do anything: the good reason and the real reason."

This article was born when I stopped to reflect on this phrase, commonly attributed to the finance giant who helped constitute General Electric, John Pierpont Morgan, better known as J.P. Morgan.

Back to the world of biology, nothing and nobody designed us the way we are. We are the most recent result of constant mutations and survival tests in the environment, over millions of years. We are at the top of that chain, Homo Sapiens, and, thanks to thinkers like Descartes, we define ourselves as “rational animals.”

Indeed, one of our most striking characteristics is having a brain equipped with a prefrontal cortex (PFC), which gives us cognitive skills, personality, expression, decision-making capacity, and the moderation of social behavior.

But our brain is the result of evolution, and the PFC is only the most recent episode. According to the triune brain theory, the second oldest part is what we know as the limbic system, the source of emotions, along with the proto-reptilian brain.

A characteristic present in the brains of all animals, from invertebrates up to us, is the instantaneous mechanisms we can summarize as “emotions.” Joy, sadness, fear, courage, pleasure.

It’s a good thing we have emotions like fear, because that’s what makes us react even before reasoning about it. It can be the millisecond of reaction that makes you dodge the car you didn’t consciously notice but that would have killed you. The same millisecond that keeps your hand from getting too close to the mouth of an animal about to bite.

Technically, emotion and instinct aren’t the same thing, but emotion carries that instinctive component.

The important point, and the theory behind Somatic Markers, is that the emotional reaction comes first and only then comes the rational reaction, which takes longer to process. That order matters. Using a metaphor borrowed from Freud’s psychology, we can equate the emotional brain with the “Id” and the rational brain, the PFC, with the “Ego.”

The order we’re used to says that, at least in our slower, more “pondered” decisions, we can “turn off” the Id almost completely and use only the Ego’s cognition. We run cost-benefit analyses, weigh the facts impartially, and make the best possible decision.

What neuroscience shows is that the opposite may be happening. First your Id has already made a decision (“I want that!”) and then your Ego rationalizes and tries to justify that decision (“I want it because of reason X.”). Some people call this “gut feeling,” intuition, a visceral emotional reaction.

That is, the “real reason” comes first, the emotional reaction. Then you justify and express it with the “good reason,” the rational reaction.

This matters because we don’t think in that sequence. Without being rigorous, look at what’s known as the “Marketing Mix,” the 4 Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. In the 1960s, Jerome McCarthy coined the term and Philip Kotler turned it into dogma in his magnum opus, the Principles of Marketing. The 4 Ps already grew into 7 Ps, then 4 Cs, 4 Es, and they keep spawning derivations.

Looking at it from the surface, most of us are conditioned to rationalize: comparing technical specs, trying to justify one product as superior to another because of price, technical features, availability. When we think about how to present our product or service and how to differentiate it, the focus is usually on making it “better,” “faster,” “cheaper,” all rational justifications we imagine will most influence the other “rational animals” like us.

The role of Marketing starts before justifying the product or pleasing the Ego. The primary thing is to provoke the Id first, to create the visceral emotional reaction. The objective features still count, and they become tools for the Ego to use when justifying the choice. But the choice will already be made. That’s the beauty of the theory.

You can justify as much as you want how many goals your team scored this championship, how many titles it won through history, the lineup. All of that is your ventromedial prefrontal cortex trying to rationalize the emotional choice the limbic system has already made. If you love football, no amount of rationalization will make you switch your “heart team.”

You can’t adjust the levels of noradrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine directly, injecting chemicals into people to move their emotions (only psychiatrists can do that legally). But you can affect these reactions through other channels. Human beings have five senses that serve as an interface. Any advertising campaign that features children, for example, wants to manipulate your limbic system into the first emotional reaction before you stop to rationalize.

So far we’ve only scratched the surface of what fields like medicine, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and economics have been researching in recent decades. The intention is just to show that these fields exist, that knowledge about human behavior evolves all the time, and that you can draw many new perspectives from it to use in the real world.

Information < Knowledge < Understanding Or What? < How? < Why?

The story goes like this. There was a Ford Foundation birth control project in India, and the team was frustrated trying to teach family planning and birth control, with no results at all.

“Indians are irrational.”

That’s what they thought, because:

“They know that the number one enemy is the population, and here we are teaching about control, giving contraceptives, and even a radio as a reward. But look what happens. They go home, turn on the radio, and with music make a new baby.”

Some time later, The New York Times ran a story about a Brazilian woman who had given birth to her 42nd child. And they thought: “If that’s not being irrational, then I don’t know what irrational is.”

But thinking about it: “If one woman can have 42 children, then why do Indians, on average, only have 4.6? That means they know how to practice control, but aren’t willing to do it. Maybe we’re trying to solve the wrong problem.”

Later they discovered that, at the time, there was no social security, no retirement, and no unemployment benefits. So having 3 sons was, by default, the retirement system. Every couple’s first priority was to secure their own old age.

Statistically, having 3 sons requires an average of 4.6 children in total. Unsurprisingly, once a couple hit 3 sons, they stopped. Now, who’s the irrational one? The Indian couple who won a free radio, or the Ford Foundation guy who figured they’d give up their own retirement for a dinky little radio?

When we talk about “birth rate problems,” we have the information, or the what: couples averaging 4.6 children push the population up too fast. We also have the knowledge, or the how: birth control programs, contraceptives, lectures. What’s usually missing is the understanding, the why.

Without that understanding, we keep applying cookie-cutter recipes that simply don’t work. Once we understand the why, we can derive far more effective solutions.

Remember all that talk about root cause analysis, or the five whys? They’re all ways of going after the real cause behind the symptoms.

Update: 11/10 I added a final section on a recent topic from Fred Brooks.

In my recent talks on organizations, I show a video of the Asch experiment. It demonstrates how people go along with a group even when they know the group may be wrong. For all sorts of reasons, they conform anyway.

For us agilists, think of a team doing Planning Poker or a Retrospective. When most of the team answers one way, the minority tends to go with the group. Some hold their ground more firmly, but the default is conformity, and that has to be taken into account. Watch to understand:

Asch Conformity Experiment from Fabio Akita on Vimeo.

On top of that, we still run on organizations with outdated structures. Hierarchies, positions, bosses, procedures, policies. All of that, as I say in the talks, doesn’t work anymore and only limits the organization as a whole. Does it bring short-term results? Sure, that’s why everyone still uses it. In the long run, it builds a sick organization.

One of the factors is authority. In this kind of organization, when there’s a “boss,” the effect is simple: responsibility for the executed task shifts from the subordinate to whoever gave the order. It’s what everyone has heard before: “I was just following orders,” or “I just work here.”

This holds even for atrocities (Nazis torturing Jews, for example). One theory says the person may even understand that what they’re doing is wrong, but since the decision came from an authority, they don’t feel the same remorse, don’t think about alternatives, and don’t even consider just stopping.

The one who demonstrated this was Stanley Milgram, back in the 60s. The BBC redid the same experiment, and you can watch my subtitled summary:

These are all real dangers that happen in our day-to-day:

• People conform very easily
• People don’t like looking wrong, so they don’t take risks
• People obey authorities, whether bosses or people with higher status in some way

That’s one of the reasons so many agility projects fail. It’s no use saying “the team decides the best path” if there’s still someone with veto power. The veto only has to be used once for no one to take anything seriously again.

Current organizations limit people, their potential, any chance of motivation, any individuality, and in the end they turn people into robots. The more an individual conforms to this structure, the more amorphous they become, almost a walking piece of meat.

So the only way out is to eliminate power hierarchies. Watch my introduction to this idea in the talk I gave at Rails Summit 2009 (video credits to @agaelebe, thanks for filming):

Organizations, as classical, closed systems, tend to stagnate and collapse. It can take ten years, but that’s what happens, naturally. Complex adaptive systems, on the other hand, keep evolving, learn from small failures, and refine their own processes.

That requires heterarchies in place of hierarchies, spontaneously formed groups, with decentralized control. Hard to swallow? I agree, and that’s exactly why the people currently in positions of authority should be a bit more literate before they go off executing. Which brings me to another point:

• People today deal with knowledge superficially: they’d rather “do” than “waste time” learning.

Dan Pink gave a TED talk on motivation. To recap the starting point: no one can motivate another person, so don’t even try. People motivate themselves or they don’t, and the most a company or a manager can do is demotivate them. So the main thing is to stop getting in the way.

What Dan shows is the obvious: companies keep using archaic techniques based more on folklore than on science. The system of rewards and punishments doesn’t work. Take a look:

He says people need three things to motivate themselves: Autonomy, the desire to run their own lives; Mastery, the desire to get better and better at what they do; and Purpose, being part of something bigger than themselves. What he’s describing, deep down, are dynamic, interactive Agents in a Complex Adaptive System. These agents interact with each other, cooperate and compete, and evolve around “Strange Attractors,” which are the purpose or identity of the group or company.

Agility is a natural evolution of the old management processes. Democratic Organizations are the longest and most far-reaching step for an organization.

This article is just an introduction. Reread my off-topic articles from the last few months to get more of the picture.

Fred Brooks

I had the pleasure of watching Fred Brooks at Latinoware this year. I was a little frustrated by the thin crowd: his talk should have been packed and had barely anyone. A sign that most people don’t even know who he is or don’t care about the subject, which is pretty sad.

Fred talked about a couple of chapters from the book he’s writing. Let me note that he didn’t present the full content, so a lot of what I speculate here may be explained in the other chapters.

The theme was the importance of “someone” being the Master Guide of a project. He says projects, especially the large ones, need a Chief Architect or something similar to keep the final product coherent. He gave examples like building an airplane with separate teams, with people talking to all of them all the time to make sure the whole thing stayed integrated and consistent.

I agree with the explanation. It’s satisfactory, and complex system architectures really don’t just “appear” out of nowhere from several people or teams working separately.

There is, however, an enormous caveat here. Depending on how you read this explanation, if you hold the title of “Architect” or are certified in “Systems Architecture,” you might feel very justified by a celebrity like Fred saying architects are vital to a project. Well, you’re wrong.

An architect is, in the end, a leader, a condition earned by merit. Position, certification, or someone’s orders don’t enter into it. Take the Linux kernel. No one appointed Linus Torvalds to the post of “benevolent dictator” of the project. He emerged from a need, people accepted his leadership, and if they’d been very unhappy, all it took was a fork for a new leader to step in.

Real leaders emerge on their own. As a project like this grows, other leaders come up naturally in each part of it. The ones Linus calls his “lieutenants” show up, like Andrew Morton once was.

This point matters: leadership is acquired from the bottom up, and it isn’t a post of authority dictated from the top down. Leaders evangelize their point of view, convince people, and to a degree can even impose certain positions. But when there’s abuse of that position, the team around them can and should reassert their values. And if the fight ends with no winner, the way out is to leave the project, instead of conforming and carrying on, as the Asch and Milgram experiments show.

This works really well in the open source world because it’s a distributed environment, with no fixed hierarchies or positions. People move between the various parts of a project, there’s discussion, opinions count, and new ideas get tested in practice. It’s the polar opposite of how software gets made at a traditional company. A denser take is in the classic The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric Raymond.

Someone who thinks they can solve a given problem starts taking the reins. The people around them see value in it and start collaborating. The initial architecture goes through revisions and evolves. That “leader,” usually the author, keeps the initial vision alive and folds in the proposed changes, even when they’re better than his own ideas, instead of falling into the backward stance of “I didn’t make it, so I don’t approve.”

Understanding the open source world is the key to understanding agility and democratic organizations. They were born this way because of the environment’s constraints: people spread around the world, volunteers, no physical contact, the need to keep the code coherent.

Leading is different from bossing. A leader has no right to just bark orders. A real leader is a servant leader: he collaborates and helps the team instead of ordering people around and telling them how to do it. He influences, evangelizes, surfaces other points of view, and seeks consensus.

Sometimes he has to make the harder calls, like going against the majority to preserve the project’s integrity. But do that the wrong way too often and the team should pull him from the position. Here, Emotional Intelligence counts as much as, or more than, raw IQ.

So yes, projects need a vision that ties everything together. That doesn’t justify anointing someone autocratically as the “architect,” though. In the best projects, that position emerges on its own. If a team can’t let a leader emerge and someone has to be appointed, it’s already fundamentally broken. Good luck with that project.

@AkitaOnRails, if you crash the plane tweeting with that 3G on, you’ll embarrass the whole country! LOL!!!

It was a joke, of course :-) But it was the push I needed to finally write about it: people acting on false premises.

A few months ago, on my way to yet another event, I kept my iPhone on, on purpose, as always. I usually flip on Airplane Mode once we’re in the air to save battery, but before takeoff I was watching a video podcast. Then a lady next to me decided to pick a fight and told me to turn it off. I ignored her. So what did she do? She called a flight attendant. Ugh.

She even blurted out what a lot of people still ignorantly believe: “this ‘gentleman’ is risking my life!” Picture my urge to fire back a “shut the fuck up!”. Of course I didn’t :-)

I figure readers of my blog don’t buy this, but even so, plenty of people may not know why the warning exists in the first place. Just think it through. If a wireless gadget really had even the slightest chance of interfering with the plane’s communications, enough to bring it down, would you, as the airline owner, let anyone board your plane with a cell phone?

It’s the same as letting someone board with a bomb and politely asking: “we kindly ask passengers carrying bombs not to activate them while inside the plane.” Duh. The fact that we can board with electronics is already proof that none of them put the plane at risk. That would be idiotic. If it actually brought planes down, every cell phone would go into the cargo hold in a lead container, the same way sharp objects never make it past security.

So if it does no harm, why does that damn message still play before takeoff and before landing? Now comes a conclusion by induction. What are the two most critical moments of a flight? Takeoff and landing.

Those are exactly the moments the crew wants everyone alert to any emergency announcement. If everyone’s got headphones on, playing video games, typing on a laptop, an emergency message takes forever to reach the whole cabin. The only goal of telling you to shut off your gadgets is to get our attention. Nothing else.

Here’s my conspiracy theory. If they told the truth, “to have your attention in an emergency, we ask you to turn off your devices,” nobody would turn anything off. So they figure it’s better to put collective stupidity to work and say “please turn off your cell phones, video games, mp3 players and computers, and airplane mode isn’t enough.”

In other words, they quietly weaponize the fear of signal interference so that passengers police each other, the way that lady policed me. That builds peer pressure that forces everyone to comply, just to skip the argument.

By the way, if any of this were actually true, I’d never board a plane. Bad actors exist, so why trust that they’d switch theirs off? And I wouldn’t understand anyone working on a plane knowing the passengers are a hazard. Picture that.

So yes, if you believe a cell phone signal can bring down a plane, you’re still stuck in the mental laziness I described in my previous article. If you want more detail, I stumbled on a Mythbusters episode today about exactly this.

Electronic gear does not bring down airplanes. Airlines are cleverly cashing in on the fear that collective ignorance produces. Smart strategy.

Oh, and although this doesn’t exactly count as proof, I’ve tested it on nearly all my flights and kept my iPhone and iPod on the whole time :-P No plane fell out of the sky, obviously. But sure, I always pay attention during takeoff and landing, because I get the principle. The rest is just experimentation.

I’m reading the excellent The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of essays by Ayn Rand first published in 1964. Before the sarcastic cracks about the word ‘selfishness’ start, let me point you to the book’s introduction:

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute, as its answer, in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one’s own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute’s activities are in fact to one’s own interest (which altruism enjoins man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors).

That said, I don’t recommend this book to everyone. It goes straight at the concepts we now file under “common sense,” and most people have zero interest in touching that :-D Seriously though: if you enjoy thinking, this collection is a good time.

Just for a taste, I’m transcribing several excerpts from chapter 9, The Cult of Gray Morality. It lands best if you show up with an open mind.

The Cult of Gray Morality

One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture, is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: “There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.” This is asserted in regard to persons, actions, principles of conduct, and morality in general. “Black and white,” in this context, means “good and evil.” (The reverse order used in that catch phrase is interesting psychologically.)

In any respect one cares to examine, that notion is full of contradictions (foremost among them is the fallacy of the “stolen concept”). If there is no black and white, there can be no gray — since gray is merely a mixture of the two.

Before anyone can identify anything as “gray,” one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other is evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture. There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil. In morality, “black” is predominantly the result of pretending to be merely “gray.”

…

If, in a complex moral issue, a man struggles to determine what is right and fails or makes an honest error, he cannot be regarded as “gray”; morally, he is “white.” Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

But if, in order to escape the responsibility of moral judgment, a man closes his eyes and mind, if he evades the facts of the issue and struggles not to know, he cannot be regarded as “gray”; morally, he is as “black” as they come.

Many forms of confusion, uncertainty and epistemological sloppiness help to obscure the contradictions and to disguise the actual meaning of the doctrine of moral grayness.

Some people believe that it is merely a restatement of such bromides as “Nobody is perfect in this world” — i.e., everybody is a mixture of good and evil, and, therefore, morally “gray.” Since the majority of those one meets are likely to fit that description, people accept it as some sort of natural fact, without further thought. They forget that morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice (i.e., to his free will) — and, therefore, that no statistical generalizations are valid in this matter.

If man is to be “gray” by nature, no moral concepts are applicable to him, including “grayness,” and no such thing as morality is possible. But if man has free will, then the fact that ten (or ten million) men made the wrong choice, does not necessitate that the eleventh one will make it; it necessitates nothing — and proves nothing — in regard to any given individual.

…

A similar notion, involving similar errors, is held by some people who believe the doctrine of gray morality is merely a restatement of the proposition: “There are always two sides to every story,” by which they mean no one is entirely right or entirely wrong. But that is not what this proposition means or implies. It does not mean that the claims of both sides will necessarily be equally valid, nor even that there will be a small grain of justice on both sides. More often, justice will lie on one side, and the disqualified (or worse) premise on the other.

There are, of course, complex issues in which both sides are right in some respects and wrong in others — and it is here that the “package deal” of pronouncing both sides “gray” is least permissible. It is in such issues that the most rigorous precision of moral judgment is required to identify and evaluate the various aspects involved — which can be done only by unscrambling the mixed elements of “black” and “white.”

The basic error in all these various confusions is the same: it consists of forgetting that morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice — which means: forgetting the difference between “unable” and “unwilling.” This permits people to translate the catch phrase “There are no blacks and whites” into: “Men are unable to be wholly good or wholly evil” — which they accept in foggy resignation, without questioning the metaphysical contradictions it entails.

But not many people would accept it, if that catch phrase were translated into the actual meaning it is intended to smuggle into their minds: “Men are unwilling to be wholly good or wholly evil.”

The first thing one would say to any advocate of such a proposition, is: “Speak for yourself, brother!” And that, in effect, is what he is actually doing; consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or inadvertently, when a man declares: “There are no blacks and whites,” he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: “I am unwilling to be wholly good — and please don’t regard me as wholly evil!”

…

Observe the form in which people encounter this doctrine: it is almost never presented as something positive, as an ethical theory or a subject for discussion; predominantly, one hears it as something negative, as a quick objection or reprimand, in a manner implying someone’s guilt or breach of something so obviously absolute that it needs no discussion. In tones ranging from surprise to sarcasm to anger to indignation to hysterical hatred, the doctrine is thrown at you in the form of an accusation: “Surely you don’t think in terms of black and white, do you?”

Caught by confusion, inability to defend oneself and fear of the whole subject of morality, most people quickly answer guiltily: “No, of course not,” without any clear idea of the nature of the accusation. They don’t stop to think that the accusation is saying, in fact: “Surely you are not so unjust as to discriminate between good and evil, are you?” — or: “Surely you are not so evil as to seek the good, are you?” — or: “Surely you are not so immoral as to believe in morality!”

…

Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of “evil,” regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are “extreme” — i.e., consistent).

…

Such are the reasons why — when one is asked: “Surely you don’t think in terms of black-and-white, do you?” — the proper answer (in essence, if not in form) should be: “You’re damn right I do!”

In that sense, religions and superstitions do have their problems. That doesn’t mean religious people can’t be excellent programmers. They are! There’s a mistaken view that atheists like me, when we talk about religion, only want to slander, badmouth, ridicule. Slow down, we’re not that bad. Just as we don’t judge anyone by their color, we don’t judge anyone by their belief either.

The problem is when devaluing evidence in favor of superstition leads to real harm, like the setback in stem cell research. Or when someone drops a serious medical treatment for a glass of homeopathic water.

It’s interesting how many discussions in the tech world have a large irrational component: my language is better than yours, my process is better than yours, my Linux is better than your Mac, my Ruby is better than your Java. People assume there’s an absolute Right and Wrong: for one side to win, the other has to lose. If mine is obviously the Right one, the other guy’s is, obviously, the Wrong one. As Einstein would say (in another context, I know), everything is relative.

Readers of my older articles have noticed that I don’t root for any team. I’m a Ruby programmer, but I have no problem opening Visual Studio and writing some C#. I own several Macs, but I optimize a Windows or a Linux box just as comfortably. Anything that improves my knowledge is welcome. What’s the practical point of limiting yourself?

The motivation to write about this came from two videos from England’s Channel 4: “Enemies of Reason,” a two-episode documentary that could be watched in full on Google Video (episodes 1 and 2). The host is one of my favorite non-tech authors: Dr. Richard Dawkins. Biologist, fierce defender of evolution, and the man who coined the term meme, first introduced in the excellent The Selfish Gene.

He’s also the author of my recent favorite book: The God Delusion, released in Brazil by Companhia das Letras as Deus, um Delírio. That book spawned another Channel 4 documentary, which I also highly recommend: The Root of All Evil?, also available on Google Video (here and here). The second episode is titled “The Virus of Faith.”

Dawkins belongs to a much-criticized new generation of atheists known as the New Atheists. The same group includes authors and scholars like Sam Harris, author of “The End of Faith,” and philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.”

The biggest problem is fanaticism. There are non-fanatical religious people (fortunately, the majority). But the fanatical minority is dangerous, and many of them sit in the halls of power, shaping everyone’s future. We already went through an era of religious alienation known as the Middle Ages. We’re lucky to be a post-Renaissance generation. Regressing out of sheer lack of reason makes no sense.

Politics and culture aside, what personally bothers me is the lack of self-worth. I’m not defending the arrogance of someone who thinks he knows everything without knowing anything. But the simple “Thank God” is an unconscious brake. If you achieved something, the credit belongs to you and your collaborators. Luck helps, but it’s just a statistical event. Nothing is impossible: some things are only probabilistically more unlikely.

If you didn’t achieve it, the responsibility is entirely yours too. I feel many people have a hard time owning their responsibilities, for the hits and the misses alike. The credit and the blame for your actions are exclusively yours. Live with it.

Another thing that bothers me: all the material I mentioned here will be heavily criticized. Maybe I’ll get a flood of angry comments, as usual, or maybe I’ll just be ignored. Either way, prejudice will make a lot of people simply refuse to look.

That’s another problem: the path of learning demands reason and logical reasoning built on solid evidence. It’s been almost a century and a half since Charles Darwin published his Theory of Evolution, and nobody in the sciences was arrogant enough to upgrade it to a Law of Evolution. The same goes for technology: nobody can claim “my technology is superior.” It’s all relative, and nobody here has the authority to create a Law proving such a claim. What we need to keep in mind, to build a consciously investigative environment, is: “if mine isn’t the best, what are the alternatives? what’s the evidence? what are the circumstances?”

Joseph Campbell would say societies need mythologies, heroes, beliefs. It’s a way of explaining what we don’t know and of communicating what counts as Right or Wrong in a given period, since those concepts shift across space and time. As we evolve, we kill one god at a time: Ra, Isis, Osiris, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, and many others. We explained where the Sun rises, where it sets, what’s in the sky, where we come from, where we’re going, and a ton of other natural events.

As Richard Dawkins said, we miss Carl Sagan. For me, he produced two of the most inspiring works there are: the “Cosmos” series and the book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Every child should be encouraged to watch the whole series and learn to think for themselves, free of dogmas and superstitions.

As Dawkins shows in the documentary, astrology books and other superstition titles vastly outsell science books. And even among documentaries we get superstitious productions peddling fairy tales with science as the pretext, like the dreadful “What the Bleep Do We Know?”

In a competitive world, with plenty of problems to solve, like diseases, conflicts, global warming, and resource scarcity, we need the largest number of skeptical, non-superstitious brains of all time. Only then will we move forward instead of stagnating in the magic tricks of the past. And even setting the big questions aside, as individuals, we cannot and must not become enemies of reason.

Definition of Science: from the Latin “scientia,” or “knowledge.” According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary: “knowledge attained through study or practice,” or “knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world.”

Science refers to a system for acquiring knowledge. This system uses observation and experimentation to describe and explain natural phenomena. The term also refers to the organized body of knowledge people have gained using that system.

Science is an elegant system because the scientific method is simple and coherent (observation/research, hypothesis, prediction, experimentation, and conclusion), yet rigorous enough to be reliable, mainly because, by definition, it has self-correcting mechanisms. It is independent of personal opinion, belief, or point of view. The Law of Gravity is the same for everyone, regardless of race, culture, ideology, age, or social condition.

No hypothesis earns the status of “Law” without solid enough evidence for it. Besides, every theory (or hypothesis, defined as a suggested explanation) can be discarded if solid contrary evidence shows up.

Definition of superstition: (1) an irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome. (2) (a) a belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance. (b) a fearful or abject state of mind resulting from such ignorance or irrationality. (c) idolatry.

Finally, the definition of dogma: (a) something held as an established opinion; especially: a definite authoritative tenet. (b) a code of such tenets (pedagogical dogma). (c) a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds. (d) it cannot be disputed or doubted.

I’m buried in work (it’s 2 AM on a Sunday), but this little thought caught my attention because it’s simple and, even so, most people still fall for it. The original post is Sunk Cost for Architects, but I think it should be Sunk Cost for Managers. Here’s the translation:

Let’s say you’ve bought a movie ticket but then realise from Rotten Tomatoes that the movie stinks. Assuming you can’t sucker one of your friends to buy the ticket, you have a couple choices:

1. Since you’ve paid for the ticket, you might as well suffer through the movie anyway.
2. Throw away the ticket and do something else.

Now what?

The sunk cost fallacy is not realising that in either case, you’ve already paid for the ticket and therefore the sunk cost is not relevant for rational decision making.

Case 1: You suffer the cost of the ticket + You suffer through the movie

Case 2: You only suffer the cost of the ticket

Therefore, rationally 2 is the better option.

So instead of a movie ticket, let’s say it’s an enterprise software license… or perhaps some custom hardware.

Should how much was paid for the license or hardware have any bearing whatsoever on what is decided to be the best future architectural approach?

Well, only if the management system you’re operating in punishes rational behaviour and rewards irrational behaviour.

Total common sense. Economists are more used to studying and cataloguing behaviors like this. I recommend reading about other concepts like the good old Opportunity Cost. Parkinson’s Law, to me, is the corollary of the gas expansion law, and every developer (myself included) has suffered from it.

Nobody’s right all the time, but the daily exercise of thinking with logic and skepticism, instead of running on dogmas and precepts, improves our odds a lot. Maybe then, whoever watches A Beautiful Mind will remember more of the genius behind the Nash Equilibrium than the melodrama.

She’s deeply interested in the brain, artificial intelligence, psychology, and philosophy. Her articles show a different angle on things we should already know. This post is an excellent example. Here’s the translation:

Dilbert and the Zone of Mediocrity

Caption. [title] “How users feel about your product or service”.
[arrows] “here is good”, “here you’re screwed”, “here is good”.
[bar] “Love”, “Zone of Mediocrity”, “Hate”.

How brave are you? How far will you (or your employer) go to avoid the Zone of Mediocrity? Until or unless you’re willing to risk passionate hate, you may never feel the love. Scott Adams agrees. In a recent post on the Dilbert blog, he wrote:

“If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed… The reason that a product ’everyone likes’ will fail is because no one ’loves’ it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it.”

This is NOT about being remarkable. It’s about being lovable. And that almost always means being hated as well. Our Head First Java book, for example, has 139 Amazon reviews, and most are either five stars (“love it, best technical book ever, I learned a lot”) or one star (“hated it, worst technical book ever, authors should be shot”).

But crafting a book that people would either love or hate was not our intention. We set out to make a more brain-friendly learning book format, and we were just clueless and naive enough to not realize how many implicit “rules” we were violating. It wasn’t until O’Reilly editors started a mini revolt against it that we knew we’d crossed a Line That Shall Not Be Crossed and created something potentially embarrassing.

Today, it is often far more risky to create something “safe” than to take a big frickin’ chance on something deeply provocative, dangerously innovative, or just plain weird.

Think about all the things you love today that once seemed very, very weird. Things that someone took a huge frickin’ chance on.

Today, the more you try to prevent failure, the more likely you are to fail

That wasn’t always true, but geez… how many more [whatevers] do we need today? There are way too many of all the things we already have and not enough introductions of things we don’t have. We all know the reasons why companies play it safe, and why employees are often forced to play it safe, but this me-tooism isn’t helping anyone.

What does it take to move out of the Zone of Mediocrity?

Normally at this point I’d talk about the usual things everyone talks about… how to come up with breakthrough ideas, where to look for opportunities, being innovative, blah blah blah. You know all that. I think it really comes down to this:

To avoid the Zone of Mediocrity, you must suspend disbelief

You must be willing and able to turn off (temporarily) The Voice inside that says, “We’ll never get away with this. People will hate it.” That doesn’t necessarily mean The Voice is wrong, but until you can shut it off, you’re virtually guaranteed to stay with safer, incremental ideas. But remember: “safer” really isn’t safer anymore, unless you’re looking only to avoid criticism. Safe will keep you safely out of the spotlight. If that’s what you want (and sometimes that’s the best approach), then fine. But if not…

(side note: this is somewhat like The Inner Game approach or Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or any of the other approaches to creativity that get your logical “talking” mind out of the way, so all the more useful but non-speaking parts of your brain can get on with the important things you’re trying to accomplish.)

And it’s not just suspending disbelief about what users (or critics) will say… you must also suspend disbelief about what your company will let you do. I first experienced this at Sun, where it was almost impossible to creatively brainstorm about ways to improve things without someone jumping in with, “Yeah, but they’d never let us do that.” End of discussion. End of chance to do something amazing.

Every time I do an internal workshop, the participants are far more negative than when some of those same people are in a public version of my passionate users workshop. By taking them outside their company and having them brainstorm or work on fictional or other people’s projects, their minds are free to move about. I’ve nearly quit doing in-house workshops because the “they’ll never let us do that” syndrome is so strong.

You can’t help users kick ass until your employer lets YOU kick ass. Easy for the unemployed ME to say ; )