Through a Google Glass Darkly

In a phrase, the internet revolution may be summed up as a global movement, inspired by IT overlords to move our intelligence to machines while decreasing our intelligence by encouraging us to do mindless things. In other words, the internet is dumbing us UP and dumbing us DOWN.

His and Hers Google Glasses

A case in point are a new software tool that will allow us to be omniscient in a robotic Terminator sort of way, and a new software app that will help terminate our intelligence. The latest such boon to man or should I say peoplekind is called Google Glass, and brings Google two inches from your nose. The second, called Instagram, helps you make your pictures look old or otherwise crappy.  Jon Stewart on the Daily Show recently took note of this. His take on it is worth a billion virtual dollars!

Dream Jobs

In the movie ‘The Matrix’, super computers at the time had to run on batteries, and since human beings had more of a charge to them then your typical Ray o vac battery. So they farmed crops of humans who were kept alive by existing in a virtual world consisting of a nine to five grind in a cubicle and no stock options.  And so humans thrived in their real and virtual cocoons, and as the machines figured from hard experience, they would have it no other way. (except for those few who wanted a different reality, and live in a cave and eat pea soup for the rest of their lives. These folks were called neo-phytes).

Dream Jobs

What with green energy and fracking, humankind has got this energy thing down for the time being. Although the battery problem is solved, the reality one persists, and that’s when the Matrix reenters, and in a good way if you like cubicles that is.

According the most prognosticators on the subject, computing power is trending to infinity. This is particularly good for app creators, who with all that infinite power can model not just Duke Nukem, but the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke, and even lowly you. Called an ancestor simulation by the Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom, Bostrom has surmised that if one of your descendents, and I mean just one, decides to emulate you to see what life was like in the 21^st century, or perhaps get even with you for the mega trillions of national debt he has to pay back for your medicare, then very likely he can emulate just about everybody, and in every variation. In other words, if anybody in the future decides to run an ancestor simulation, then almost certainly YOU are living the mind of a computer, and are a simulation! Even I cannot make this up, but ultimately I don’t need to if I am made up.

Well, back to my dream job………………….

Keys to your Facebook

If you want that dream job, dream date, or dream bank loan, it used to be that there was only a minimal amount of information you could cough up, and then you were sure it was carefully chosen to not reveal the embarrassing facts that if better known would send you packing or even packing off to jail. Presently, some employers are asking potential hires to hand over your password to your Facebook or other social media accounts so that your character, resume, personality, can be properly inspected. This controversy may be dampened by federal law, public outrage, or just saying no, but in the end it’s probably all moot, as your privacy has likely already escaped.  There is plenty of stuff out there to embarrass you, only you don’t know it yet.

But you will.

Right now, if I wanted the scoop on a competitor, a friend, or the next door neighbor, I would have to do a laborious internet search, and then laboriously make some sense out of it. Not anymore!  For the software tools we use from day to day, all that stuff can now be brought to you automatically, whether you ask for it or not. Consider the common customer relationship management program.  The CRM we use at our own company, called Capsule, instantly goes out and grabs all the social networking connections of any individual whose email you type in.  So now you not only have their name but their ugly mug to look at, and instant access to their social networking connections that you never asked for in the first place. This is somewhat scary, for what this means that someone else who has that email can pull out all my social networking stuff and God knows whatever else is out there about my life. Of course, my life is as pristine as the driven winter snow (i.e. I am boring), but very likely yours is not. It used to be that only running for President would reveal your dirty laundry. Now your laundry is all over the place, so if I were you I’d watch your sox life among other things, or else create a fake facebook page!

See also:

The Onion reports that by 2040 every potential presidential candidate will be unelectable due  to Facebook.

Mr. Greenjeans and the Laptop Bunnies

For those of us who remember the past, or when we had teeth, to learn about the latest good stuff you had merely to turn on Captain Kangaroo in the morning.  Mr. Greenjeans was the family farmer who would daily bring warm and fuzzy creatures that we would want to adopt for some coin, an idea that was later replicated by the web app ‘Farmville’ and virtual  bunnies.

              When bunnies were a ‘Best Buy’

Back then, you could feel and touch the bunnies close up before you made your buying decision, and the knowledgeable farmer was right there to answer any of your questions.  Of course, now we have smart phone apps that can read the bar code on the bunnies, and allow you to find an identical bunny at the factory farm for far less money and a better bunny warranty. Naturally, this puts the family farmer out of business, and leaves your progeny wondering what bunnies are actually like. However, at least we have bunny user reviews.  
                                                                           

Looking and feeling is a user experience that no amount of user reviews can replace.  When shopping moves to the web and our brick and mortar stores close, we are losing something priceless. Presently, pricing apps promote judgment by hearsay rather than experience. So, we will miss our experience with cuddly bunnies, laptops, wide screen displays, hard bound books, and much more of what used to be called a shopping experience. And our bunnies, like everything else, will live somewhere disembodied in the cloud. 

Searching for Red Stockings: The Myth of Information Overload

As the internet advocate Clay Shirky noted, everybody who talks about information overload starts with the graph with the telltale ascending line and the litany of the troubles it entails. As the line informs us, information is increasing exponentially, and we can barely deal with it intellectually and emotionally, or more and more often, we can’t. And the solution?  It is here that the rallying cries diverge.  

Scary Graph (from Basex.com)

On one side there is Shirky, who assigns the problem to filter failure, and why not? It’s a reasonable thing after all to suppose that if we had better ways to sort out information, we could cull the bad from the good, and be able to significantly reduce the information we have to cope with daily.  Search, social media, and e-commerce firms of course concur, and are rapidly improving their search algorithms (using of course information about you that you voluntarily or involuntarily port over to them) so  you can find what you need the first time.

On the other hand is the internet critic Nicolas Carr, who attributes information overload to filter success. In Carr’s opinion our filters are working all too well, and the problem is that they are getting better and better. 

Thus,

“….The real source of information overload…. is the stuff we like, the stuff we want. And as filters get better, that's exactly the stuff we get more of.

It's a mistake, in short, to assume that as filters improve they have the effect of reducing the information we have to look at. As today's filters improve, they expand the information we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow out the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases.”

Implicit in both arguments is this premise:

The information we want is the same as the information we need.

This is an argument for the curing salve of better filters (to fine tune what we want, since our wants are finite) or a call for mass despair (because our wants are infinite, and thus overwhelm us when they are invariably served by the web). This premise derives from an assumption that in our hubris we are wont to make: that humans are rational agents that know what they want and why.

But what if this was not true?  What if we are at root irrational creatures who delude ourselves into thinking that we know what we want and why we want it? What if the information we want is more often than not different from the information we need? If this is true, then to paraphrase Shakespeare, our fate is not in the stars (or rather the cloud), but in ourselves, because if the information that we want is often not the same as the information we need, then we need to be aware how to distinguish our wants from our needs and how and when  to constrain the former.  In other words, for information overload, the key is to understand how our basic motivations work.

The question that Shirky and Carr beg is thus elemental: Why is information of interest to us, because it is important, or because of something else?  To answer this question, let us illustrate how a basic search was performed over the last few generations by going to our metaphorical sock drawer in search of red stockings.

It’s 1912, and you as t-shirt manufacturer want to begin a production run of commemorative t-shirts of the Boston Red Stockings triumph in the World Series. As soon as the game is over you receive an immediate telegraph of their victory, and it’s off to the races to start production.

It’s 1932, and you as a t- shirt manufacturer want to get started with your commemorative t-shirt run, and so you listen to the game on the radio, and upon its completion, get to work.

It’s 2012, and you as a t-shirt manufacturer want get to cracking on your production run celebrating the Boston Red Sox victory, and you follow the sox from college draft to preseason to all of their games through the World Series, and monitor all the social and news media who have something to say about it.

In all three time frames, the decision point happens in a second at a predetermined moment, namely when (hopefully) the sox win. The narrative of how that final fact (a sox victory in the final game) got there is irrelevant. No matter what era, the decision point is concise, precise, and momentary, and gets to you on time regardless of the media you use and irrespective of its background story.  There is no need to follow the narrative that describes the changing facts that get us to that point, as the point of the last man flying out in the last inning is all we need.

The difference between the three eras is that in the first era we could not follow the narrative that follows the sox on their way to the pennant, but in the latter era we could. But following the latter comes at a cost.  By following the progress of the sox we become diverted from other things of value, and suffer regret.  If these diversions are small scale and populate our working day, they become distractions and cause us to lose focus and attention. Finally, as we continually choose between distraction and staying on course, we become tense and nervous.

The metaphor of ‘information overload’ would seem to apply here, as every frame of every moment of the continuous narrative leading to the Red Sox pennant can and is considered by the sox fan. However, like a strip of static frames in a motion picture that give rise to a sense of movement or motion, the story is interesting because of the novel ways the narrative changes, and it is the changes that compel. Thus, although the ending is necessary for us to go about our business, the story that leads to it is compelling not because of what it is, but how it is continually transformed.

We can expand our simple Red Sox narrative to the narratives embedded in all the things we do that are being progressively revealed by the web. We need to know facts, but what obsesses us is the narrative or story that brings us to those facts.  The internet produces not just more information, but more narratives of information. We see not a picture, but a movie, not a note, but a score, not a phrase but a speech. Moreover, we conflate the importance of the narrative with the significance of its conclusion, or what we want with what we need. This is a dangerous delusion, for the stuff we want depends upon the narrative or facts in motion, but the stuff we need depends upon the facts sitting still.

We can get the facts we daily need in a half hour, but continually accessing the web to see a moving stock market, middle east crisis, or what Uncle Charlie is up to are never ending stories that excite us, engage us, but ultimately bring us down. A narrative is of course still important if our behavior necessarily changes in tandem. In this case the narrative is ‘feedback’. Thus, a quarterback’s performance is determined by feedback during the moment to moment course of the game. However, for the stadium audience, this feedback is entertainment, and for those who attend to the ever expanding narrative on the game itself, an unnecessary and harmful obsession.

The Myth of Information Overload

As a metaphor, information overload attributes the psychological effects of the internet to what information is rather than how it is arranged.  But humans are above all novelty-seeking creatures, and novelty is enhanced not in the facts but in the stories they tell. Because the explanation for how the web influences us psychologically is based on core assumptions on human motivation that are faulty, we proceed with our daily lives under a dangerous illusion abetted unfortunately by the perverse incentives of our media providers to keep us hanging onto the story when the conclusion is all we need. Whether or not we can escape this illusion and its dire consequences depends ultimately on not just a better story, but also a better explanation as to how our minds actually work.

Sources:

Finding a better story to describe the emerging fact that wanting and liking aren’t the same thing takes you to the seminal work on the topic performed by the neuropsychologist Kent Berridge on the topic, or my own narrative on Berridge’s work and what it means.  Hopefully both make for some interesting explanations.

New book from yours truly!

Here's my new book, with twice the knowledge and half the stupidity of my other stuff.

One Track Minds: The Surprising Psychology of the Internet

This book, in 1000 words (actually, 1,008 words)

Occam’s razor: Tool used by the medieval King Occam of Slovenia to cut the heads off philosophers who rambled on and on. It was later used to describe the logical principle that cut off rambling arguments and replaced with simpler ones, although it may be argued that King Occam had the better idea.

One of the problems with books that have a big idea is that the big idea can be easily communicated in a page or so, leaving the writer with the problem of how to fill in the rest of his opus, which he promptly does by adding the history of the middling ideas leading to his great idea, the great implications of his great idea, repeating his great idea in multiple variations, or just explaining his idea to begin with. Given my own bright idea, this author decided to go through the route of explanation, which if deleted from the manuscript, gives you this page. So here’s the main idea of the book, served not by explanation but analogy, which is thankfully much shorter. 

So I present to you this tale that tells the main idea of our book. Let’s say that you are a tailor, continually in need of needles to pursue your trade.  Consider if you would a haystack, and the fact that for some reason your needles can only be found in the haystack. An inefficient state of affairs to be sure, resulting in your need to painstakingly go through a lot of straw to get to your needle. Let’s say that in your wisdom you design a ‘search engine’ (i.e. a big magnet on a string) that will allow you to sort through all that straw to get to your needles. Passing the magnet over the haystack, you find not only your needle, but lots of needles of every color, form, and shape. The first needle does what you need, but each additional needle is of interest also, but not as much. Nonetheless, you end up spending much more time than you would like looking at all the fine needles in your collection, which you eventually look back ruefully as a big waste of time. In other words, whereas the haystack caused you to waste your time looking for a needle, a stack of needles caused you to waste your time looking at needles.

But wait you say, isn’t looking at all those extra needles rational as well, and represents a free and unfettered choice guided by the fact that all those extra needles are of inherent interest?  That’s a fine point if people behaved like a computer, which they don’t. The analogy instead is more like a steam engine, which has to get fired up before it can ever get going, and often can’t stop when it does. Similarly, when we are faced with a demand for performance, the mind and body has to prepare itself or get ‘fired up’ for performance, but stopping is another matter. Get in place to run a race, and your muscles will tense to prepare you for a quick release, see a plate of tasty food, and you will salivate to prepare for consuming the food, and perceive a lot of novel and salient information, and your attention will perk up so you can process that information efficiently. But when we pay attention to novel information, do you stop when you’ve had enough? Well no. That’s because perking attention is not a just a cognitive activity, but an affective one as well, as our ability to consume information efficiently depends upon a non-conscious reason to want to stay on task, and that’s where affect comes in. In other words, to process information effectively, we must ‘want’ to do so, and wanting ‘feels good’. Thus to keep on task, our brains prejudice our immediate behavior in service of an immediate goal, namely processing important information in a timely way, and it does so by temporarily skewing the momentary importance or ‘incentive salience’ of behavior.  The brain does this by releasing the neuro-chemical or ‘neuro-modulator’ dopamine that modulates or changes (in this case increases) the rate of firing of arrays of neurons in the brain. Dopamine increases the efficiency of learning, increases alertness, and causes a positive affective state that spurs us on. Dopamine is the source of the common temptations that cause us stray from our long term goals. The temptations of sex, eating, and other pleasures all implicate dopamine activity. However, as the word temptation implies we normally do not conflate the momentary temptation to eat with the long term value of eating reasonably. In other words, temptation represents the urge to take our pleasures in the moment without regard to their long term advisability. Moreover, temptation can grow if we perceive more of what we want, thus we are more tempted to eat when we are confronted with a sumptuous buffet, have sex when we look at pornography, etc.  Similarly, when we are presented with a rich informative environment such as the web, the temptation to remain in that environment increases, and we end up overstaying our welcome on sites that remain affectively important even after their logical importance wanes.  The negative results are manifold, and result in regret and unhappiness over time ill spent, a disruption of attention and memory due to constant distractive interruptions (e.g. checking email or social media), and the anxiety and tension due to the constant indecision and confusion this brings to daily decision making.

So how can you deal with this problem? The procedures are simple, starting with a radical reduction in distraction, but first you need a good explanation, or understanding, hence this book. As with any important problem, explanation is key, for without it one can be easily swayed by rationalization, demagoguery, and outright fakery. In other words, my argument must not just seem right, it must be right, and to be right it must be clear, concrete, and above all easily testable or refutable. That is the intended purpose and lesson of this book. 

Social Media as a Turing Test?

“The dominant social networks are fantasy games built around rigged avatars, outright fictions and a silent — and often unconscious — agreement among players that the game and its somewhat creaky conceits influence the real world. This pact is what distinguishes Facebook and Twitter from other fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons and L.A. Noire. And because of this pact, and because so many hundreds of millions of people participate in this pact, Facebook and Twitter do have meaning and significance in the real world. Just as paper money is valuable because people who use it believe it’s valuable, Facebook and Twitter — right this minute — have value entirely because a whole continent’s worth of people believe they have value. So many players have invested so much trust in these games that they can’t afford not to believe they’re paying off.”  Virginia Heffernan, New York Times July 24, 2011 (Opinionator, online commentary)

The importance of reality in choosing our incentives is presently made much more complicated due to the fact that the internet has virtualized incentives that can never be ‘cashed out’ to true social goods such as status, personal favor, or money. (Sort of like 'Monopoly' money replacing the gold standard) Consider this far fetched or very real scenario, depending of course upon your point of view. Everyone you know has been consumed by the cloud, and you are the last person standing. Outside of your normal amusements and curiosities, no human is around to provide you the incentive to do anything. And that’s a problem, because if no wants anything from you, whether is evidenced by individual or institutional mandates of collections of individuals, you ain’t going nowhere if no one wants you to be there. To get motivated, you need to arouse your animal spirits, and that takes more than individual choice but institutional design. Luckily though, in your isolation you have your own virtual reality emanating from voices in the cloud. For even though everyone has gone to the cloud, they kindly left you their IP addresses, and they want you to stay in touch. And so they poke you , IM you, and tweet you often to know that they care, and most often this is no more than the faint imprint of your stat sheet to let you know they visited. They are pithy in their praise, but that’s enough for you to blog, share, or otherwise spend you time with them. It’s inspiration from a thousand glimmers of attention from ‘friends’ you never knew you had. It all could be from an auto-responder of course, or the glancing attention of a bystander on the street who couldn’t be bothered. But you of course see more, and because you read more into these minute moments dutifully registered by your search engine you are transfixed by the constant tally of attention of a growing roster of friends, connections, contacts and followers who leave their mark in a word, or not even that. You have become in this virtual world a well connected, universally befriended, and consistently followed hermit.

To take measure of the scope of this illusion, consider this comparison to  real life, when everybody looks at you and ‘remarks’. Walk down any busy street, and you receive a moment’s attention from passersby, gain the brief acquaintance of sales clerks, and infrequently chat with a friendly face who spares a minute and no more. If you monitor, tally, and even predict all this are your friendships greater or richer?  Of course they are not because you know they are not. But if these nods of acquaintance are the virtual nods of a tape register, or a tweet, prod, or ‘like’, what is stopping you from inferring more? Indeed, because the motivations of our contacts are veiled, it is all too easy to surrender to the delusion that what is under the curtain is not just a contact but your best buddy. But how can we test this comfortable surmise?

Enter the Turing Test. The Turing test, envisioned by the cybernetic pioneer Alan Turing in the 1940’s, was a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. An individual engages in a conversation with one human and one machine, both hidden behind a curtain, and each providing verbal responses to questions. If the judge cannot reliably tell the difference between the machine’s responses and the humans, the machine is judged to be intelligent. However, intelligence does not just entail intelligent response, but intelligent action. Let’s say during the test you fall off your chair. The human behind the curtain can at once come to your aid, while the computer can only commiserate. After all, ‘he’ is just a talking typewriter. And this is where social media becomes surprisingly unsociable. Building virtual social capital depends upon the circles of friends you have, but to see if your virtual capital can turn into real capital turns on a simple iteration of Turing’s original mind experiment. This new Turing Test requires not that they respond intelligently to you, but whether they will come to your assistance if you proverbially fall off the chair. Put that mind experiment to the test and you will find that almost all the automated nods from your social media ‘friends’ just might as well come from automated bots or intelligent typewriters, because you get intelligence but no empathy, no understanding, and ultimately, no action from intelligent agents who will commiserate with you, and no more.

Avatar for yours truly,

who will commiserate with you, for ten bucks

So where does this leave us? It makes us doubly doubtful about a distractive world that is not only useless, but indifferent. But it also leaves us with surveying the benefits of a distraction free world wherein we are just mindful of it all. (As I am sure, you the reader will comiserate!) 

Feedback Overload

Since the invention of writing, the written word has literally piled up. Indeed, from very early on, mankind has been overloaded with information. However, the problem posed by of information overload is not in a metaphorical stack of stuff, but in our relative inability of finding the needle of information we need in the haystack of information we don’t. Things like the Dewey decimal system, book indexes, and a helpful librarian barely addressed the problem until the invention of the internet search engine allows us to find our need, or in this case, needles. As the pundit Nicolas Carr opined[i], the problem we confront today is not finding a needle in an infinite informational haystack, but finding an infinite stack of needles that all merit consideration. Nowadays, when we electronically search for any topic, we are provided with many similar bits of information that allow us to more precisely fine tune or correct the deficiencies of knowledge. This error correction or feedback function represents a progressive resolution of the discrepancies between what we do and don’t know. Feedback may represent unexpected changes in our progress to a goal and/or unexpected changes in our knowledge of the nature of a goal. Feedback of course is essential to learning, but consequential to that learning is the increased activity of midbrain dopamine neurons, and it is the neuro-modulator dopamine that enables the consolidation of memory as well as heightened alertness and attention on the task at hand. But dopamine also increases positive affect that adds momentary value or ‘incentive salience’ to behavior, but does not intrinsically predict the overall or long term goodness or utility of behavior. Put a bit differently by the neuro-psychologist Kent Berridge, “The brain results suggest that pure decision utility—and not predicted utility—is raised by activating mesolimbic dopamine systems[ii].”  What this means is that the importance of the decision in the moment, or its ‘decision utility’ does not influence its long term or ‘predicted utility’. The implications of this are profound, for as the marginal utility of examining each informative ‘needle’ declines, the successive needles of information remain novel, and we continue to dwell on nearly redundant links of information not because they are useful but because they are new. In other words, whereas in the past impoverished feedback environments caused us to waste much time looking for information, the rich feedback environments heralded by improvements in web search lead us to waste much time looking at information! This means that we will be affectively and not rationally inclined to overstay our welcome on sites that not only provide us what we want and need, but infinite variations of the same information that we ‘want’ but don’t need. The problem thus is not information overload, but ‘feedback overload’, as the ever increasing amount and granularity of information feedback provides greater and greater detail that can increase the short term or moment to moment value of behavior to the detriment of our long term interests.

Information Search, CA 1960

Information Search, CA 2011

This increase in the momentary incentive salience of behavior can be used to conform with (if not predict) practical ends, but its ultimate value depends upon whose practical ends.  For example, the ‘Khan Academy’ (khanacademy.org) is an online math tutorial that uses rich feedback embodied in badges, scores, hints, etc. to increase the decision utility of performing math exercises in service of the predicted utility of long term mastery of say, the mathematical calculus. On the other hand, a Google search also provides rich feedback including social network feeds, instant messaging, videos, helpful links, and now badges in the service of the predicted utility of Google, namely advertising. 

Ultimately, the problem is not that we are lost in a haystack, but that we are proverbially resting on a bed of pins and needles with each pin needlessly diverting our attention. The notion of ‘feedback overload’ means we are neurologically inclined to overvalue the short term importance or salience of new information, and when new information scales in amount and availability, we begin to live for a moment that may not conform to our ultimate good. For the rich feedback mechanisms provided by the internet, whether it is social media of just plain search, the solution to this problem is not better filtering of information or better feedback (as this merely acerbates the problem), but less, and can only be accomplished by constraining what information you can see, or when you can see it. The simple solution is keeping your personal library and newspaper, and severely restricting your time with search tools (the internet) that work too well. As internet feedback trends to infinity in ever morphing detail and availability, this will be our only option to spare us a new dark age caused by being blinded by the light.

References:

Berridge, K. and Aldridge, J. W. Decision utility, the brain, and the pursuit of hedonic Goals, Social Cognition, Vol. 26, No. 5, 2008, pp. 621–646

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~berridge/

Nicolas Carr, Roughtype (blog)

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/03/situational_ove.php

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Feedback and Explanation 1.0

Blocking: The concept derived from Pavlovian conditioning that associations or learning attributed to a stimulus will not occur if those associations are redundant or superfluous. For example, a lab animal may learn that a red light signals food. If a green light follows and just as reliably predicts food, the animal will not learn to associate green with the food, since prior learning 'blocks' the association. Blocking should not be confused with blockheadedness, which is characterized by an inability to learn new and better explanations to an event once the first explanation is fixed in your mind.

Explanation is critical, for if you only go by the correlations of nature, your predictions can go seriously awry. Oftentimes those correlations work consistently, and for our practical affairs universally (though not perhaps it may be added for the universe). Throw a ball into the air, and Newtonian mechanics will predict where it will land. Of course, Newton’s laws break down when you are considering the very tiny (Quantum physics) or the very large (General Relativity), but the Newtonian inductive (i.e. consistent un-falsifiable correlations prove the rule, as compared to the deductive approach that uses the rule to predict and falsify correlations) approach is a reliable solution to our practical problems, even though it is irrelevant to our cosmic ones.

When we get down to human nature however, explanation seems to be on the wane.  For our practical affairs, it is now the correlations that count. They are easy and cheap to derive, and with the advent of data mining, we can find correlations upon correlations that would make even Newton blush. Now even without Newtonian equations, behavior can be predicted with pinpoint accuracy through the correlations found through the brute force of our computing power. With predictions like this, who needs explanations!

And so we don’t.

This mindset is characterized by net denizens and wizards (Isaac Newton, who considered himself an alchemist first, was also a wizard), who have every confidence in their predictions, and have the gathered eyeballs and mega bank accounts to prove it. To illustrate this mindset in action, consider this recent article in by Thomas Goetz in Wired Magazine on ‘Feedback Loops’.  Getting feedback not only informs, but it motivates, and getting prompt and regular feedback can get people focused, motivated, and aroused to do what they need to do. This is a simple and reliable premise vouched from not only all human experience but all recent iterations of human experience. The internet in particular provides us with not only information, but also feedback as to the state of our behavior. Harness that power, and you can harness human motivation, presumably of course for the good. All well and good, except that there are negative correlations within the positive correlations that a data miner may overlook but a good theory or explanation predicts.

Life is full of traffic signals

Consider that blinking road sign up ahead that gives you your speed. The information is redundant, as you know your speed from a quick glance at your speedometer. Nonetheless, as the data show, this feedback motivates you to slow down, and even after the sign passes keep slowing down. However, as Goetz claims, this is due to the fact that ‘people are reminded of the downside of speeding, including traffic tickets and the risk of accident’ (as if the speedometer doesn’t!).  So whether information feedback is redundant or non-redundant, feedback works. The implicit correlation and thus prediction nested in Goetz’s article is that non-redundant and redundant feedback have a sort of equivalency. The fact is though, they don’t. Humans and indeed almost all sentient creatures do not tolerate information redundancy, indeed they don’t have the time or computational space for it. In fact, redundant information is automatically blocked out through a well known process aptly named ‘blocking’. As an illustration, consider another road sign example. Suppose you see a traffic light turn red, and then ten seconds later a second brown light also turns on. Both red and brown light correlate with ‘stopping’, but only the significance of the red light will be remembered. The information from the other light is redundant, and is therefore blocked. So when the light turns brown, you will not stop because your brain blocked you from considering it. This blocking phenomenon holds for all creatures and all events, and forces another explanation for Goetz’s data, namely the fact that people may be slowing down because they perceive that the blinking road sign does not just give information you already know, but information you don’t, namely the greater likelihood that there is a cop around the corner. I may be wrong here, but that is a good thing, because as with all predictions coming from good explanations, this premise is imminently testable. For example, put that feedback on your speed on every billboard you pass, and see what happens!

But there is another prediction that comes from explanation, namely that novel or unpredictable events provide an incentive salience or importance to moment to moment behavior that depends upon how information is arranged, or to point, its feedback function. The neural basis and explanation of feedback is that we are responsive not only to the ends of our behavior but to the novel twists and turns that get us there.  In other words, performance feedback works because it activates mid-brain dopamine systems that are sensitive to the novelty that is implicit in non-redundant feedback. But dopamine is not activated by redundant information, only novel info will do. Hence the motivating power of redundant information if refuted yet again, but this time from predictions derived from how explanations of how the brain actually works. In other words, it ain’t loopy feedback loops’, but the novelty that counts, or in the large the explanation that counts.

Information Overload: The Anatomy of a Delusion

Information Overload: The Anatomy of a Delusion

Sometimes the proper use of a product is ignored, owing not to a lack of awareness of its effectiveness, but to a lack of an explanation of how it works. For example, in 1839, draping your bed with finely woven gauze curtains was known to ward off malaria.  Malaria, which  means bad air, was generally considered to live up to its name, and be the literal result of well, bad air. Thus, hanging curtains around your bed presumably filtered the air, and thus helped prevent malaria. Nonetheless, going beyond mere curtain hanging to properly covering your bed with curtains didn’t catch on until a proper explanation of malaria was at hand that suggested as a matter of course the preventative measure of mosquito nets. But this didn’t stop another invention that stopped malaria just as well by treating it was thought, all that bad air. The invention was the inspiration of early 19^th century Florida physician John Gorrie, who in an experiment sealed off a room and conditioned the air with a special device of his own invention. Of course, conditioning the air wasn’t the cause of malaria, but it had the incidental benefit of cooling it, and air conditioning lived on because it made you comfortable, and not because the system incidentally didn’t allow mosquitoes in. The explanation of mosquitoes as the carrier of malarial parasites resulted in the better use of available procedures that stopped mosquitoes, namely mosquito netting, and it provided the source of new procedures that stopped malaria (e.g. fumigation, swamp draining) as well as explaining why other procedures worked (e.g. air conditioning systems) and why other procedures of the day (e.g.handkerchiefs soaked in vinegar; garlic worn in shoes) that seemed to work, didn’t.

John Gorrie’s ‘Bad-Air’ Conditioner

Now consider a modern malady that doesn’t kill you, but manages quite well to kill your time. This is the modern bane of ‘information overload’. “Information overload refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information” (Wikipedia). A logical problem with this definition is that we have always been in the presence of too much information, as a simple walk through any library can demonstrate. Before the internet, navigating this wealth of information was rudimentary and difficult. You used a card file to determine what you needed and walked around different book stacks to find it. Invariably what you found was often not exactly what you needed, but it had to do because the transaction cost for information, namely rifling through card files and roaming book stacks simply was too high.

In the internet age, our filters are immeasurably better, and we can get information tailored to fit our request, or employ intelligent agents that use a mere history of our internet behavior to find the information we need. Moreover, we can get this information for a negligible transaction cost, or for free. The problem is as any web search demonstrates is that we are handed with many variations of the same information, or information that is nearly redundant. In other words, different variations of the same information in different sites essentially restate the same information. For example, perform an internet search for ‘high gas prices’ and you will get a score of links to different articles that discuss high oil prices. If we were rational agents, we would read one or two articles and then cease, knowing that the marginal usefulness or utility or reading a third or fourth article decline markedly as they would restate the same information and generally arrive at the same conclusions. But the fact is we don’t. Indeed, we may read many more articles on the topic and even far removed from the topic, and then come back to the web after a few hours to read more. The same goes for any matter of internet searching, whether it is social media, email communications, or just looking up a sports score.

Ultimately, the problem of information overload derives from the implicit assumption as to what type of information is actually overloading us, and what overloading means. To gain our attention, information must not just represent random correlations between events, but rather correlations between events that have predicted value or utility.  But information also has a degree of novelty, and it is the integration of novelty and utility and not utility alone that determine the importance or ‘incentive salience’ of moment to moment behavior.  Utility and novelty are integral aspects of information, and even if information has marginal utility it still becomes an object of desire if that information is novel. Thus an individual may initially access his email because its utility far outweighs the novelty of discovery, but by the fortieth time in the day that he checks his email, the novelty of the act far outweighs its utility. Moreover even if we know the behavior has low utility, we often keep on searching. In addition, we are affectively primed to search for new information by in effect (or perhaps in affect) looking forward to accessing our email, social network, news feed, etc.

The concept of information overload implies that we are deciding between an abundance of information that is of uniform utility, but this is not true. Because of well honed filtering systems provided by the web, we can generally find what we want quickly. The problem is that the internet generates nearly redundant information that is distinguishable not by its usefulness, but by its novelty. In other words, we are not overloaded with information that is primarily useful, but are overloaded with information that is primarily novel. By generating infinite variations of the same information, the internet primarily generates not useful but novel information, and the overload is not in the information we want and need, but in information we want but don’t need.

So the problem, as the example of Gorrie and his air-conditioner demonstrates, is that ‘information overload’ like ‘bad air’ is a false cause for a very real problem, mainly the web as a source of distraction rather than value. So the real solution is not to create better filters, since they ultimately don’t matter, but rather to limit our access to the web to those times when it logically means something, not when it doesn’t. In other words, the solution is not found in better filters, but in merely draining the swamp.

I can't eat an I pad!!!

It was Dudley, trying to do right.

It didn’t work.

A few weeks ago, William Dudley, the president of the New York Fed, attempted to give a street corner education to a crowd in Queens, New York on the cost of living. As the Wall Street Journal reported, ‘The crowd wanted to know why they were paying so much for food and gas. Keep in mind the Fed doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy calculations because they aren’t part of ‘core’ inflation. So Dudley tried to explain that other prices are falling. “Today you can buy an i-Pad 2 that costs the same as an i-pad 1 that is twice as powerful. You have to look at the prices of all things.” This prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring in the audience, with someone quipping, “I can’t eat an i-Pad!”

APPetizing Sandwich

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After all, the growth of technology promised the exponential increase in the ability to make things, know things, and it follows, consume things. It boils down to an extension of Moore’s law, that maxim, now a truism, which states that computing power doubles every two years. For technological goods, this has proven to be more or less true. Witness of course the more powerful i-Pads. However, for non technological goods, productivity growth has been incremental, not exponential, and in many cases has even been reversed due unfortunately to computing itself. The problem is, if our technological robots actually served robots, things should be moving along swimmingly. The earth would be moving to a singular transcendence with eight billion purring i-brains splendidly served.

Unfortunately, technology serves people, and this has served up some very unintended consequences. To which I offer up this corollary to Moore’s law, which I will call with fitting immodesty: Marr’s law. It goes something like this: as computing power doubles, the amount of time you can waste doing computing doubles as well. Consider this fact as ‘proof’. In 1960, our information systems, namely radio and TV, could only serve up facts that mattered. Now, with ubiquitous computing, it’s serving up mainly facts that don’t matter, and it’s getting better and better at serving up just the facts that you want but don’t need, and soon it will be doing it 24/7 from the i-whatever appliances tethered and perhaps in the future implanted in your brain. Soon, we will all have the wits of floor lamps, and our floor lamps will have all the wit. And what will our smart appliances eat? Why, i-pad sandwiches of course!