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What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447

December 7, 2011 By Tempo

Popular Mechanics has a fascinating and terrifying look at the decision-making failure in the Air France crash:

“We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.

Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three highly trained pilots flying for one of the most prestigious fleets in the world. If they could fly a perfectly good plane into the ocean, then what airline could plausibly say, “Our pilots would never do that”?”

Read full story.

Tempo now available on the Nook

December 2, 2011 By Tempo

You can now get Tempo on the Nook. I hope I’ve now got 90% of you covered. If you’re on some other reader (Sony, Kobo), you’ll have to wait. Seriously, get with the monopolists program and get on one of the big guys already.

Kidding aside, should have other outlets covered by year-end.

Nook away. I don’t own one, so would appreciate an all-ok note from one of you Nookers.

How the World Works

December 1, 2011 By Venkatesh Rao

If you want to seriously level-up your thinking about how the world works, you might want to try reading 3 very ambitious books together: Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years. All three are from the reading list that I posted in August, so I am hoping at least some of you have been attacking them.

It’s worth reading them together because they attempt to tell the same story, towards the same purpose — explaining how the world works in some sense — drawing on roughly the same body of raw material. It is illuminating to see the surprising ways in which the stories agree and disagree. All three books are also particularly valuable for me personally, since I hope to take a stab at telling the same story some day.

My version will of course be the definitive one when I write it, but let’s take a look at the versions of the story on the market today.

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The Pomodoro Technique

November 29, 2011 By Tempo

The last few times we’ve chatted, my good friend and fellow time-management-hacker, Erik Marcus, has been urging me to try out something called the Pomodoro Technique (there is a book that’s available free at the website). The idea is deceptively simple: to organize work in 25 minute uninterruptible sessions, with forced 5-minute breaks in between (and longer breaks every 4 sessions), using a clearly visible time signal. The 25-minute session is called a pomodoro (named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that the author, Francesco Cirillo, first used when experimenting with the idea).

Reading it, I realized that I’d encountered versions of this idea before (I recall my 9th grade biology teacher making us try something like it back in 1989), but had never stopped to consider the psychology of the idea. I recommend reading the book (it is free like I said, and very short at 45 pages). Here are my initial thoughts on how/why it works and how it relates to the ideas in Tempo. If you’ve used it, I am curious about your take.

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The Towers of Priority

November 21, 2011 By Venkatesh Rao

First, let me get an announcement out of the way: Tempo is now out on the Kindle. Buy it, give it as a gift, tweet it etc. Whew! That’s a big, high-priority item checked off my to-do list.

Speaking of priorities. I had one of my weirder Aha! moments: you can use the well-known Towers of Hanoi game as a metaphor to understand the behavior of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (or any similar hierarchy of priorities) under changing life circumstances, and the role of compartmentalization as a costly coping strategy. Here’s a picture:

If the details and implications of the metaphor aren’t immediately obvious, read on for the help-text.

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Tempo Now Available on Kindle

November 21, 2011 By Tempo

Tempo is finally out on the Kindle. The link is to the US version ($9.99), but it is available on all the international Kindle stores as well. In case you weren’t aware, you don’t need the Kindle device to read a Kindle book. You can use your smartphone or PC (just download the appropriate free reader app from Amazon). You can also give Kindle books as a gift (hint, hint!).

Curious factoid I thought I’d share: I now have the Kindle device, as well as apps installed on my iPhone, iPad and laptop (PC). Since the apps all synchronize, I often find myself reading a book in small or large bursts across multiple devices and reading sessions. Surprisingly, I get a lot of the reading done on the iPhone, since I always have it with me, and often have a few minutes here and there (while waiting in line at the post office for instance). The tempo of my reading habits has changed. I now finish most books via a series of 5-minute sessions rather than a few 2-3 hour sessions. It is somewhat more inefficient, due to the switching costs and getting back into the flow of the book. I suppose I’ll be thinking about this new behavior of the book medium a lot more with my next book. Maybe design it to be coherent at both the 5-minute burst level and the extended-session level.

I’ll get to other readers (Nook and the rest) shortly. I’ll also be sending out the promised free copies to those who played the pass-it-along game with the early beta edition.

The Evolution of the American Dream

November 16, 2011 By Venkatesh Rao

Remember the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and their sloganeering? In the beginning of the story, when they overthrow the humans, they lead with the chant, “four legs good, two legs bad!” By the end, they’ve become human-corrupt, and lead the chant, “four legs good, two legs better!”

Just one word changed, and the new and old words both begin with b, bolstering the illusion of continuity and natural evolution.

Let’s call such a slowly shifting narrative, simple enough to be captured in a slogan, and designed to help a small predatory class dominate a larger prey class, a Pig Narrative. The American Dream is a Pig Narrative. For the record, in case you are immediately curious about my politics, I think this Pigs-and-Prey structure of the world is the natural order of things. You can mitigate its effects, but not change it in any fundamental way. If I had to pick, I’d side with the pigs. Moving on.

You can compare Pig Narratives on the basis of the degree of prey liberty (or conversely, predator control) they represent, allowing you to plot the evolution over time. If you plot the course of the American Dream through its many rewrites (9 so far by my count, each associated with a major coming-of-age event that defined a generation), you get something like the picture above.

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Technology and the Baroque Unconscious

November 11, 2011 By Venkatesh Rao

This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

Engineering romantics fall in love with the work of Jorge Luis Borges early in their careers. Long after Douglas Hofstadter is forgotten for his own work in AI (which seems dated today), he will be remembered with gratitude for introducing Borges to generations of technologists.

Borges once wrote:

“I should define the baroque as that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its own possibilities and which borders on its own parody…I would say that the final stage of all styles is baroque when that style only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks.”

The baroque in Borges’ sense is self-consciously humorous. Borges’ own work in this sense is a baroque exploration of the processes of thought. As one critic (see the footnote on this page) noted, Borges writings “serve to dramatize the process of thought in the apprehension of truth.”

Unlike art, complex and mature technology (not all technology) is baroque without being self-conscious. At best there is a collective sensibility informing its design that can be called a baroque unconscious.

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