If you ever learn about optimization, the second technique they teach you after “hill climbing” is something called “simulated annealing“. Forget trying to work through Wikipedia’s definition of it, here’s how I mentally visualize it:

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

Hotel Marque de Riscal

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

Upside Down Hotel Marque de Riscal

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

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

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

A Gem style paperclip

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

A Konaclip style paperclip

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

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

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

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

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

Sketchpad circa 1963

Dynabook circa 1972

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

Xerox Alto circa 1973

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dream Job is so simple I’m wondering why I’ve never heard anyone propose it before.

I’m going to start off describing The Dream Job by the most inconsequential and most easily changed details because, well… you’ll see.

The Dream Job pays one million dollars per year and only one is offered every year. Every application for The Dream Job must be made public. Once you’re hired, the only power the employer has over you is firing you. That’s it, those are the only overt constraint for The Dream Job, everything else flows from there.

You don’t apply for The Dream Job by sending in a resume. Well… you could but you’re not likely to get it. There’s only 1 Dream Job a year, you need to dazzle. The Dream Job is only for people who first of all love that company very very much but that love is tinged with a deep channel of ambivalence. It’s for people who are driven with the desire that this company, while great, could be so much greater if they could only fix this one thing and you are the right person to fix it.

I would be deeply, deeply tempted if Newegg offered The Dream Job (There are a half dozen other companies with which I would apply for a Dream Job without hesitation but I’m holding those closer to the chest as they’re related to stuff I’m actually working on). Classic usability isn’t even my field anymore but The UI behind online computer buying has essentially remained static since the mid 90’s and every time I want to purchase a computer online, it makes me deeply angry that the user experience is still so poor from a pure usability standpoint. I have so many ideas bursting in my about how you could revolutionize the user interface to make it orders of magnitude more productive and fitting with the tasks that people have. Give me a week to prepare and an hour to present to Newegg and I’m utterly confident I could convince them hiring me at a million dollars a year would be a bargain. Here’s a simple idea Newegg: Build a braindead reliable text parser so that I can paste the shopping cart from any other web store and you can tell me how much identical or similar items would cost at Newegg. Why should price comparing systems be a laborious half hour of hunting for equivilant components on multiple sites when some simple engineering could reduce it down to seconds?I managed to come up with 8 other ideas inside of an hour before I got bored at how easy it was.

The Dream Job is not for everybody. The freedom offered by it sounds alluring but when you consider the full implications of it, can also be slightly terrifying. Once you get in, you can do literally whatever the hell you want but that also means not a single person will actually know what you do until you sell them on it. By definition, you’re hired to do something at that company that’s never been considered before so you’re starting off with nobody obligated to give you the time of day. It’s up to you to build up the support within the company and selling people on your vision or your mission is dead before it’s even born. There’s a reason why a company full of otherwise smart people hasn’t been able to see a problem that’s so obvious to you and it most probably stems from a complete difference in cultures. You need to be not only a visionary but also an anthropologist and a translator. On top of that, you need to constantly justify your $1 million dollar expense or you will be swiftly canned. The Dream Job requires not only brilliance and passion but also deft people skills and the ability to work around showstopper obstacles.

So, given all this, why one million dollars? Simply because, even in this day and age, one million dollars still means something. It still has that allure when those crisp syllables roll off your tounge. The actual number is meaningless, mostly symbolic, and the bargain of the century to boot. Anyone that brilliant willing to work for one million dollars a year is clearly not in it for the money. Instead, the requirements for The Dream Job are simply the natural result of the observation that hiring only for the skills you know you need is a rather stupid way of doing things.

The conventional way of hiring is you first figure out what resources you need, how much you want to pay them, where they slot in the org chart and then you search for a candidate. This was great when your grandparents were busy climbing the corporate ladder but why don’t we shake it up a bit. How the hell is a company supposed to know what it needs anymore? If you’re a process nerd, then you’re going to hire a bunch of other process nerds and build a great process nerd company culture but how can you ever know what you really need is a deep design aesthetic as well? Similarly, if you’re a design person, how are you going to find out how an obsessive A/B tester can transform how you build? The simple answer is that you never will with a conventional hiring model. Instead, you need them to tell you how they want to do their job.

Everything about The Dream Job stems from transferring the onus of responsibility of defining your job from the employer to the employee. The limit of one a year is what gives it the specialness, the prestige and the cache neccesary to attract the rare people who could handle such responsibility. The million dollars and the enforced hands off approach is what gives them the confidence that The Dream Job is something the company is taking seriously and is committed to integrating as a core part of how they do business. The requirement that applications be public is a filter that screens out the chuckleheads and leaves only those who have a credible chance of deserving it. The requirements are not carved into stone, they’re simply my interpretation of what would be the minimum required for The Dream Job to even work.

 The Dream Job is so stunningly obvious that it must be wrong. I can’t possibly have been the first person to have come up with this. But if it’s wrong, it’s probably at least going to be wrong in an interesting way. If you’re in a position to, do you have the balls to offer a Dream Job? If so, you better hurry because I know the first chance I get to scrape a million spare dollars together, this is what I’m doing.

I love meeting engaged people when I’m drunk because it allows me to ask my most drunkly assholish question ever:

“So, are you guys going to sign a pre-nup?”

Roughly two thirds of the time, they give some version of an acceptable answer:

• Yes
• No because we have no assets
• No because, while it minimizes the fallout from a divorce, we feel it increases the chance of one by starting the marriage off on a wrong footing so we’d rather not risk it.

But about one third of the time, I get my absolutely most favorite answer of all which is

• No because we don’t believe it’s likely we’ll get divorced.

It’s my most favorite answer of all because, after many years of experience, I’ve found that it’s the best way to force people to actually grapple with the ego dilemma.

The ego dilemma goes something like this:

“So, why don’t you think you’re going to get a divorce? Nobody enters a marriage expecting a divorce yet many of them do”

“Well, sure, other people get divorces but we have X & Y and that makes our marriage special”

“Well, yeah, but there were plenty of people who thought they were also X & Y at the start of their marriage but they eventually found out that didn’t help them much in the end”

“OK, but did those people have Z-which-is-so-uniquely-rare-only-we-have-it?”

“You’re right, they didn’t have Z, but when asked a similar line of questioning, they had the same reaction except they put in Z* which was unique only to their marriage, it didn’t help them much”

“Look… we’re just SPECIAL, OK?”

It’s the “Look, we’re just SPECIAL” which is the hallmark of the ego dilemma, it might not ever be as blatantly obvious as that but it’s always hidden in there somewhere.

The ego dilemma is the belief, against reasonable evidence, that there is something unique contained in your ego that challenges previous historical experience. In short, the ego dilemma would be a perfectly reasonable assumption if you lived in a movie where you were the main character but a deeply tricky one in the real world.

Other example ego dilemmas include believing you’re of significantly above average intelligence, setting aside your life so that you can “make it” as a famous actor/musician/sports star/writer, thinking you WILL get the girl with that desperately creepy romantic gesture or, if you’re coming here from Hacker News, assuming that your startup has a reasonable chance of success commensurate with the effort you’re putting into it.

The truly frustrating thing about the ego dilemma is that it tells you nothing of any value. Recognizing that you’re caught in an ego dilemma doesn’t mean that you’re wrong. You could, after all, be the next Mark Zuckerberg. Someone has to be after all. But also likely is that you’re a clueless idiot who’s utterly convinced at your own fallacious arguments. We know this intellectually because we’ve all experienced the ego dilemma from the outside, you’re trying to convince someone that they’re just plain wrong but they keep on returning back to what makes them SPECIAL. And if you’re experienced it from the outside, it’s meant that someone’s experienced it from the outside at you.

When confronted with the ego dilemma, there are two wrong reactions and one right reaction.

The first wrong reaction is to aggressively try and deflect yourself away from an ego dilemma: “Oh, yeah, I probably SUCK at programming but I just don’t know it yet”. STFU: That you can even concieve that you suck at programming is proof positive that you’re above average and your sanctimonious faux-modest attitude isn’t fooling anyone, including yourself. Deep inside, you still think you’re an awesome programmer and so you still have an ego dilemma.

The second wrong reaction is to instantly assume the question is futile and throw your hands up in the air. “Who can ever KNOW if I’m smart or not?”. Obviously, you don’t live in a world where you believe that to be true. You still think and act like a person who believes they are smart.

Unfortunately, the right way to deal with the ego dilemma is tricky and complex and deserves an entire post of it’s own. It really involves revamping your entire belief structure into something deeply probabilistic with a much finer and more nuanced representation of ignorance which I promise to write at a later date when I’ve fully processed what I’m actually doing.

But the absolutly most fascinating thing about the ego dilemma, and the reason why I so love torturing the almost married is that, even if you fully agree with and accept the argument and logic behind the ego dilemma, even if you’re an otherwise intelligent and reasonable person who doesn’t commit the obvious errors against rationality, when confronted with an actual ego dilemma from the inside, knowledge of the ego dilemma helps you barely at all.

The ego dilemma is what I call an unthinkable thought, you can almost see it slip around people’s head, evading capture. It’s so fascinating to me watching otherwise intelligent people utterly unable and unwilling to grapple with the ego dilemma set in front of them.

Back to our married couple:

“So you understand what an ego dilemma is now?”

“Yes, it all seems very logical and well thought out”

“So you see how it applies to you signing a pre-nup?”

“Oh? No, that doesn’t count, our pre-nup is special”

“What? But saying it’s special is how you RECOGNIZE it’s an ego dilemma”

“It is… but this is a special exception to the ego dilemma because of…”

“ARGH”

I said to a friend last night that the first thing I would do when I became rich would be to hire someone to walk around with me and write down every word I uttered and then ritually burn every page as soon as it was filled. Truthfully, I probably wouldn’t do that if I were actually rich. You wouldn’t do it either but you get why it should be done. Now, I could intellectualize about how it’s all about male dominance rituals and signaling relative status but the truth is that if you don’t understand this on a gut level, you might as well move on, the rest of this post is going to be nonsense to you.

In ancient times, it was practically expected that the emperor would have a harem. After all, what was the point of power if not the ability to impregnate many fertile women? And yet, just 10 years ago, the most powerful person in the world almost got impeached for engaging in an act of non-procreative sex with a not particularly attractive woman. The power of life and death over slaves got morphed into the power of hiring and firing of servants which morphed into the worry that perhaps the domestic assistants wouldn’t be fully self actualized if you weren’t on a first name basis with them. Even the glutton is gone; as recently as 1917, you had the likes of Diamond Jim Brady who represents himself admirably in the gallery of great historical gluttons but who today could fill his generously sized shoes? The conspicuous consumption that remains today has sublimated into a form of simpering conformity that’s oh-so-dull to watch. Houses, Private Jets, Watches, Art & Wives… yawn (or, if you’re black or secretly want to be black: Cribs, Bitches, Bling & Cred). None if this inspires the poor to feel the visceral self-loathing of inadequacy nearly half as well as the obnoxiously creative rich of the past. Where did the panache and the admirable fuck you attitude go?

Understanding the no obnoxious rich people paradox may be the key to also understanding the no evil geniuses paradox. In both cases, the paradox is that it’s so easy to imagine these people existing that it’s difficult to imagine them not existing. Why, the only difference standing between you and an obnoxious rich person (apart from the money, duh) is your innate goodness and lord knows innate goodness is in short supply. So where did all the obnoxious rich people go?

Here’s my new stab towards an answer: Wealth used to represent a certain kind of freedom that it doesn’t now. A rich person today can usually get around most of the controls put there by society but a rich person in the past could also get around all the controls that we put on ourselves. In short, wealth allowed for one to enable the purest expression of the id. The reason why you can even imagine the obnoxious rich person is because, deep down, your id is kind of a douchebag. If you were a rich person in the past, you would have not only the desire but also the permission to act on your douchebag impulse. Fortunately, modern society has been set up so that even if you are rich, you’re not allowed to express your douchebag id in an unadulterated form. Instead, rich douchebaggery is channeled safely into much more innocuous channels such as fraternities which encourage conformity, not experimentation.

In short, the proles have won the invisible war that neither side was even aware they were fighting. It might have been possible, a long time ago to imagine an organized conspiracy by the powerful but today, it properly belongs only as a paranoid fantasy used by those who don’t want to take responsibility for their own failings. We, as a society, have managed to turn the rich from a bunch of hard nosed bastards into a set of navel gazing neurotics, largely harmless to everyone, except in their clumsiness.

One of my close friends, when asked if she would read my latest post, replied:

Not really sure I want to be enlightened in that way, but since I’m such a motherfucking glutton for punishment, I’ll read it. How does it make you feel to know that many of the things you say and write are punishing or cruel to other people?

My instinctual response is that I view pain somewhat akin to how a personal trainer would view it. Yes, there is bad pain but there is also pain that leads to growth as well and if it wasn’t at least a little bit painful, I don’t think I did my job right. But to be honest, I’d never really considered it all that closely before. It forced me to confront a world view I was somewhat alien to and, in the process, define my own world view a little more closely.

To me, pain is how you know you’re alive. Pain is thrilling because it’s transformational and without transformation, what else is there beside marking time? Pain is integrity, the prospect of pain is where you prove to yourself who you really are. Pain ties deeply into notions of masculinity and what it means to be a man. The masculine concepts of courage, cowardice, stoicism & loyalty all have to deal with reactions to pain and fear. This is not to justify this world view, merely to explain it.

A lot of my writing stems from these premises. It’s confrontational and brash and requires a bit of heavy lifting to get. Until now, I’d never thought it could be any other way. Part of the reason for me starting this blog is to find a community of like minded thinkers who view the world from that same lens of intellectual masochism. It’s been a frustrating process for me that I’ve been at this for almost a year with so little to show for it from that regard but I’m going to keep on plugging away at it.

I first discovered this obviously wrong truth when I was doing my honors thesis. Time and again, I would come up with a novel idea or a neat algorithmic trick. Some of them, I would discover had already been invented 3, 5, sometimes 10 years before I came up with it. But the ones I was absolutely sure nobody had published before because I had scoured the literature and covered every approach. Well, all of those original ideas turned out to have some hidden, unforeseen flaw that rendered them either trivial or actively stupid. This lead me to formulate the belief that “anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both“. Like all obviously wrong truths, it has the paradoxical property of being obviously wrong and also true.

The premise for the statement comes from the simple observation that good ideas survive and bad ideas die. This means there exists an entire class of awful ideas that people come up with time and again only to eventually discover their wrongness and then abandon them. Every person who discovers them believes themselves to be wholly original since nothing of the sort exists in the world and each of them is met with disappointment, sometimes after many years of sweat and toil. But because failures are almost invisible, they leave no warning signs to future generations that this is an awful idea that should be avoided*.

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both” is an acknowledgment of your own stupidity. Your first instinct, when you come up with a new idea, should be to try and find out if anyone else has done it before. Your second instinct should be to try and find out if anyone’s done it before. Your third, forth and fifth instincts are to ask how come everyone else figured out this was a dumb idea and I haven’t? If you’ve gotten this far and you still haven’t discovered anything useful, you should start feeling a little bit uneasy, it probably means you weren’t smart enough to discover how wrong you are.

If you have discovered the prior art or the fatal flaw, then breathe a small sigh of relief. Unoriginal ideas are GOOD, wrong ideas are GOOD. An unoriginal but right idea is still valuable to all the other people who’ve never heard of it and chances are, if you’ve never heard of it, there will be a significant fraction of the population to which bringing this idea contributes value. Wrong ideas do more to teach you more about the world than right ideas because they teach you about some discrepancy between your expectations and the world, The corrective force of wrong ideas is what allows you to deftly cut to the core of any issue and tease out just where assumptions are weak and likely to fail.

But if you’re lucky, over the course of your life, you’re going to stumble across many ideas which are both original and right, in which case it’s still better to treat them as unoriginal and wrong. Believing an idea is unoriginal and wrong makes that idea do more work. You attack it more fiercely and from more angles. You keep on asking people if the idea sounds familiar and you’re eager to seek feedback because you’re so damn curious to discover why it could be so wrong yet elude you for so long. In doing so, you disassociate the idea from your ego so that you can take criticism about it calmly and dispassionately. Eventually, that drive of curiosity will force you to action, just to finally prove how this idea is flawed. Treating an idea as unoriginal and wrong means that the only standard you’re willing to accept is success. This brings a clarity or purpose that cuts through the confusion when executing upon that idea. Other people may be willing to make excuses or caveats that salve their ego but, as far as you’re concerned, if an idea is not successful, it’s not right**.

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both” is an idea that also applies to itself. I’ve been slowly chewing over this idea for almost four years now and it’s been frustrating to me that so far, I haven’t been able to find someone else that’s expressed it as a similar sentiment which by de facto, makes it wrong. I’m putting this out there to invite the embarrassment of someone pointing out the obvious source or the obvious flaw that I’ve managed to miss for so long. Please, tell me how I’m stupid, it would be a welcome relief.

*Some people, when first discovering this problem, come up with elaborate schemes of recording all of these common awful ideas so that future generations can avoid them. This, unfortunately, is a common awful idea.

** not right and wrong are different concepts in the same way that not being a millionaire is different from being homeless.

You heard it here first folks, the killer app for the iPhone 3GS will be augmented reality. Two features in the new release makes the iPhone 3GS the perfect augmented reality platform. First, the inclusion of an onboard compass and second, the opening up of the API to full camera controls.

Almost everyone except developers were unaware of this but the iPhone 3G SDK painfully crippled the camera by forcing you to use the provided Apple API to take pictures (this meant no real time computer vision could run on it except when Apple conveniently didn’t notice you bypassing their allowed APIs). Now that the APIs are open, expect to see a bunch of innovative computer vision apps (face detection, object detection, tracking).

But the second breakthrough is that the compass finally provides a braindead 6 Degree of Freedom (DOF) estimation. Any rigid object in space can be defined by 6 parameters. 3 spatial ones and 3 rotational ones. The iPhone 3G could estimate 5 of those 6 parameters acceptable well with GPS providing rough spatial data, the acceleromter providing fine spatial data as well as the direction of gravity. The compass provides the final, missing degree of freedom that allows for complete pose estimation.

Augmented Reality needs to know two things: Where is the sensor and where is everything else. Once you know that, you can do all sorts of really cool shit. I have no idea what will eventually come out, that’s one of the exciting things about bringing this technology to a mainstream audience, but I can point to some interesting research directions that seem plausible:

• Instant 3D modelling of everything: Wave your iPhone around an object and it’ll figure out how to create a crude 3D model of it in memory.
• Interactive furniture arranging: Go to the store, scan a bunch of furniture you want to buy, go home, drag and drop virtual pieces of furniture in your living room to figure out which piece should go where.
• Interactive tour guide: You’re walking through New York, you see a cool building, take a photo of it and all of a sudden you know it’s the flatiron building and you’re reading a wikipedia article about it.
• Photosynth the entire damn world: nuff said.
• AR Quake: nuff said.
• History view: Point to a space and if there’s a security camera pointed at it, be able to review what happened at that spot at any point in time.
• Invisible Ink: Leave messages on walls which only your friends can see. Send them on an easter egg hunt.
• Virtual Ping Pong on the phone: Use the phone screen to see a virtual ping pong table and then swing the phone to make a hit
• Physical, virtual avatar conferencing: Replicate the real world cocktail party acoustics in a virtual physical space. Cocktail parties are great because they allow the spontaneous formation of ad-hoc small conversation clusters within a larger conversation. Online tools do a poor job of replicating that dynamic but if we could bring physicality back into it, we might be able to bring some of this dynamism back into online conversation.
• A million goddamn screens: This was a project I personally worked on that unfortunately, never got to far but has a dear place in my heart. Conventional computing is predicated on screens being expensive but if you stick a tracking marker onto a piece of paper, you can turn it into a screen. What would computing be like if you could produce screens out of some cardboard and a laser printer that could be any form factor and would cost 10 cents a pop? How would this help with information overload? Imagine you have a screen in the corner that represents the pile of unread emails. If you want to read an email, drag it onto a new screen. Important emails that you need to reply to each get their own seperate screen which you keep neat and tidy by arranging them in a pile. If you want to send a file to your coworker sitting next to you, you can drag it onto a screen and then physically hand him the screen. You can have a screen for each individual participant in an IM/voice/video conferencing and pulling the screen closer means you want to be alerted but pushing it away means you want to ignore them. What could you do if you had access to a million goddamn screens over the course of your lifetime?

Are some of these examples wildly unrealistic and totally unable to work in real life? Of course, they come from research inspirations. But they demonstrate the enormous power of augmented reality which is about to be unlocked within these next few years as developers grapple with just what’s possible with Augemented Reality.

What gummed up Skinner’s reputation is that he developed a case of what I always call man-with-a-hammer syndrome: to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is an absolutely brilliant talk given by Charlie Munger (#2 at Berkshire Hathaway) that I still return to and read every year to gain a fresh perspective. There’s a lot of wisdom to be distilled from that piece but the one thing I want to talk about today is the man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

Man-with-a-hammer syndrome is pretty simple: you think of an idea and then, pretty soon, it becomes THE idea. You start seeing how THE idea can apply to anything and everything, it’s the universal explanation for how the universe works. Suddenly, everything you’ve ever thought of before must be reinterpreted through the lens of THE idea and you’re on an intellectual high. Utilitarianism is a good example of this. Once you independently discover Utilitarianism you start to believe that an entire moral framework can be constructed around a system of pleasures and pains and, what’s more, that this moral system is both objective and platonic. Suddenly, everything from the war in the middle east to taking your mid-morning dump at work because you need that 15 minutes of reflective time alone with yourself before you can face the onslaught of meaningless drivel that is part of corporate America but feeling guilty about it because you were raised to be a good Randian and you are not providing value from your employers so you’re committing and act of theft can be fit under the Utilitarian framework. And then, hopefully, a few days later, you’re over it and Utilitarianism is just another interesting concept and you’re slightly embarrassed about your behavior a few days prior. Unfortunately, some people never get over it and they become those annoying people write long screeds on the internet about THE idea.

The most important thing to realize about man-with-a-hammer syndrome is that there’s absolutely no possible way to avoid having it happen to you. You can be a well seasoned rationalist who’s well aware of how man-with-a-hammer syndrome works and what the various symptoms are but it’s still going to hit you fresh with each new idea. The best you can do is mitigate the fallout that occurs.

Once you recognize that you’ve been struck with man-with-a-hammer syndrome, there’s a number of sensible precautions you can take. The first is to have a good venting spot, being able to let your thoughts out of your head for some air lets you put them slightly in perspective. Personally, I have a few trusted friends to which I expose man-with-a-hammer ideas with all the appropriate disclaimers to basically ignore the bullshit that is coming out of my mouth. One thing I’m experimenting with is a less public portion of my blog to put that kind of stuff on (which will be made much clearer after the sorely needed redesign).

The second important thing to do is to hold back from telling anyone else about the idea. Making an idea public means that you’re, to a degree, committed to it and this is not what you want. The best way to prolong man-with-a-hammer syndrome is to have other people believing that you believe something.

Unfortunately, the only other thing to do is simply wait. There’s been nothing I’ve discovered that can hasten the recovery from man-with-a-hammer syndrome beyond some minimum time threshold. If you’ve done everything else right, the only thing left to do is to simply out wait it. No amount of clever mental gymnastics will help you get rid of the syndrome any faster and that’s the most frustrating part. You can be perfectly aware that you have it, know that everything you’re thinking now, you won’t believe in a weeks time and yet you still can’t stop yourself from believing in it now.

Man-with-a-hammer syndrome can destroy your life if you’re not careful but, if handled appropriately, is ultimately nothing more than an annoying and tedious cost of coming up with interesting ideas. What’s most interesting about it to me is that even with full awareness of it’s existence, it’s completely impossible to avoid. While you have man-with-a-hammer syndrome, you end up living in a curious world in which you are unable to disbelieve in something you know to be not true and this is a deeply weird state I’ve not seen “rationalists” fully come to terms with.

I’m a huge tetris geek and so when I discovered Torus, my first reaction was “That’s so obvious, why the hell didn’t I think of that?” which lead me to thinking about how almost every person has their own personal theory about how they think innovation happens and yet they are so rarely inclined to put that theory under empirical scrutiny.

Some people believe that innovation is technology limited and that as soon as a new product becomes practical, someone will build it. Often, the critical technological factor might not be the most obvious one. Looking at torus, their reaction would be that sure, it would have been technically feasible 20 years ago but such a variant never would have spread without the viral power of the internet. Because there’s so many entrepreneurs working on so many different approaches to the problem, one of them is bound to hit on a good idea eventually.

Other people believe that innovation is a matter of luck, talent and persistance. MP3 players as good as the iPod and search engines as good as Google were perfectly possible well before they came out but it took the genius of the designers at Apple/Google to finally show people what an MP3 player/search engine could be.

There are still others who believe innovation is a social process driven by fads and fashions. People innovated in social networking because social networking was what’s hot. Now, they’re innovating in iPhone apps. Driving innovation is largely a matter of pushing trends.

In truth, all of these explainations are more or less valid in different areas and every sophisticated person holds a complex mix of all these views but I think it’s interesting and useful to articulate your own view so that you can determine whether it’s correct or not.

Finally figuring out that you’re abnormal is akin to coming home from work and realizing that your shirt was on backwards the entire day, you wonder how many other people noticed it and didn’t say anything. I get that same feeling when I figure out that something I thought was totally normal and that everyone did was actually something that only a very few people possessed.

When I was small, I always imagined there was another me, floating roughly 3 feet behind me and above my head, looking down on me. This wasn’t an imaginary friend or an out of body experience or anything like that, it was just the part of me that lived outside of my body and could observe the world from a different perspective. The inside me would be worried about how I was feeling and my own emotional reactions but the outside me was completely indifferent to my well being and was the hyper-logical, hyper-rational being who would crunch the numbers and present the truth in an impersonal manner. Inside me and outside me would argue a lot and outside me would never win but I would at least respect his opinions. It took me until I was maybe 17 or 18 before I realized that the reason why my appeals to the outside them was not working for most people was because their outside them didn’t exist and they were unable to consider an argument from anything but a personal perspective. Because I had an outside me, I thought everyone else must have an outside them as well.

One recent skill I finally figured out not many people had is the ability to learn about a subject without subscribing to the orthodox view and it took me the recent financial crisis to hammer that home to me. When I first learned economics, I came into it enthusiastic but well aware of it’s limitations and simplifications. Surely, if I could see how economics was limiting from a high school class, these professionals with their fancy educations must be very well versed in just what the flaws and deficiencies in their subject was. It wasn’t until this crisis hit that it finally hit home to me the level of intellectual shallowness and mindlessness most economic professionals were operating under. Sure, they knew the theory and how to apply it but they also believed that, because they knew it, it was true.

Knowing that you have a skill is useful but finding out that other people don’t have that skill is infinitely more powerful because it makes you unique. However, finding such things out generally requires a jolt out of your normal circumstances. I’m really curious to see if any other people have stories about discovering unusual abilities?