Oddly Influenced

My goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than people on the left.”

TL;DR: For practical purposes, it doesn't mean anything.

You might guess, from the previous episode, that it's just that personality traits don't predict behavior. That's true, but more interesting things are going on: What does "open to experience" mean, actually? How much less open are conservatives?

Key sources:

• John M. Digman, "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model", 1999 
• Literal Banana (a pseudonym!), "The Ongoing Accomplishment of the Big Five", 2020
• Literal Banana, "Survey Chicken", 2020
• Konstantin Löwe, "Is Politics Downstream from Personality? The Five Factor Model’s Effect on Political Orientation in Sweden", 2019

Image credit:

The scatter plot showing a low-but-significant correlation was generated by Brian Marick in 2011. I don't remember the program I used.

1. It’s hard to predict how personality traits will affect behavior in new situations.
2. We don’t have a good grasp of the difference between a “new situation” and “a variant of an old situation.”
3. Small differences in the situation (like recent good luck) can make a big difference in how traits like “helpfulness” are expressed. 
4. So you'll probably need to try it and see ("probe-sense-response"), rather than assume you can find out enough to predict ("sense-analyze-respond").

Summary sources:

• John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, 2005. (This is focused on questions in the philosophical idea of "virtue ethics". Unless you care about that, this is mostly a place to find primary sources.)
• Walter Mischel, "Toward an Integrative Science of the Person", 2004

Also cited or used:

• Theodore Newcomb, The consistency of certain extrovert-introvert behavior patterns in 51 problem boys, 1929. (Not available online. Link is to the University of Illinois Library copy. All hail interlibrary loan!)
• Alice M. Isen and Paula F. Levin, "Effect of feeling good on helping: cookies and kindness", 1972. (The pay phone experiment)
• John M. Darley and Daniel Batson, "'From Jerusalem to Jericho': A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior", 1973 (the seminarian experiment).
• John M. Digman, "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model", 1999 
• Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment, 1968
• David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone, "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making", Harvard Business Review, 2007. (I used this for quotes and claims about the Cynefin framework, which is pronounced "kuh-NEV-in", as it's a Welsh word.)
• Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 1998

Miscellaneous:

•  “Always try to get data that’s good enough that you don’t need to do statistics on it.”
• What 0.14 correlation looks like

Credits

Two-slot postage stamp vending machine image courtesy the Smithsonian Museum. Public domain.

The key message begins with the observation that categories and concepts have central examples and fuzzy boundaries. The idea that categories are usefully defined by boolean-valued necessary and sufficient conditions is outdated. The stock example is the question: "Is the pope a bachelor?" The answer is, "Well, technically", but there are clearly more central examples that capture more of the concept's connotations. (See Lakoff's 1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Gregory L. Murphy's 2004 The Big Book of Concepts is more exhaustive and covers different theories.)

Examples teach you what lays within the (fuzzy) boundary. Counterexamples teach you what lays outside. You need both.

Stories stimulate the kind of learning that happens from lived experience and social interaction.

These claims are illustrated by the kind of examples, counterexamples, and stories that I think Etienne Wenger should have (but mostly did not) use in his 1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. The episode isn't a comprehensive – or perhaps even accurate – explanation of his theory. Because (I believe) of how the book was written, my understanding of the theory is shaky.

I also drew on these writings:

Wenger, Snyder, and McDermott, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, 2002

Cox, Andrew M., "What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal works", 2005
Etienne Wenger, "Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems: the Career of a Concept", 2010

I mentioned Tinderbox, a note-taking app, and Bike, an outliner.

I mentioned my habit of writing books that include mistakes that are later corrected. As advertised, the first book I wrote this way is RubyCocoa: Bringing Some Ruby Love to OS X Programming. That's a book about dead technology, and is out of print. Perhaps the best example of this style was the unfinished An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming, which is free. (The finished part is about Elm, which alas also seems dead.) Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer is an introduction to Clojure, uses something of the include-mistakes style, was pretty successful, but is old enough I've also made it free. 

The description of the apocryphal story of Saint Thecla is from the Apocrypals podcast. There's more than just man-eating seals.

The science fiction story Año Nuevo is by Ray Naylor.

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Picture of Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" via Flickr user darryl_mitchel,  under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 1991. Note: I'd say this is the least readable of the books I've covered so far, especially if you're allergic to jargon-heavy academic social science. On the plus side, it's only 123 pages (excluding bibliography and index).

Étienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, 1998
"I sure as hell am not going to share my knowledge here for free!"
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 1996

Credits

The episode image is "Apprentice" by Louis Emile Adan (1839-1937), circa 1914, original copyrighted by Braun&Co., N.Y., but copyright not renewed. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.

Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, 1996

Credits

Image of a person using a copier via Mr. Domingo.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.

XKCD, Always try to get data good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961.

Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, The Russian Revolution

Credits

Image of a cow being given a physical exam ("bright or dull") courtesy Dawn Marick.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.

Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of the novels is Something Coming Through. Here's a review. "Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was" is a short story that I think stands alone. I quote from the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, but I wouldn't read it first unless you're a fan of Gene Wolfe and like figuring out the backstory yourself.

E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1995
Paul Feyerabend, Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, 1972.

Credits

Worker and Kolkhoz (collective farm) Woman Monument from C.K. Leung, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Although I don't dwell on it in this episode, Scott uses the Soviet collective farm as a big example of a failure of Seeing Like a State.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.

The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.dev

Credits

Satellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mentioned

• One of Glenn's talks on engineering.
• The first part of Hillel Wayne's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good.
• Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969
• Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, 2010
• David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It", 1986. 
• The Neal Ford talk about constraints was taken down from YouTube because Protecting Intellectual Property by removing a whole talk that uses a short clip is far more important than Mr. Ford's ideas.

Glenn's other recommendations:

• What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, by Walter Vincenti
• Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, by Eugene S. Ferguson
• Definition of the Engineering Method, by Billy Vaughn Koen
• A number of Henry Petroski’s books shed valuable light on the actual practice of engineering:
  • To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
  • Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing
  • Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering
  • Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design
  • To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure
  • Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (this is quite different from the others, but by telling the real, non-idealized tale of how so many great bridges were built — including several disastrous failures and many other near failures — this book was instrumental in helping me understand how inaccurate the common stereotype of engineering really is)

Credits

Image of double effect distillation chemical plant via Wikimedia Commons. User:Luigi Chiesa, CC BY 3.0. Cropped by Brian Marick.

Mark Seemann

• blog
• twitter
• Code That Fits in Your Head, 2021

The books

• Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006. Goodreads description. Or: free at the author's site.
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011

Also mentioned

• Read Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, 2006
• Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain, 2021
• George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", 1956
• Rich Hickey, "Hammock-Driven Development" (video), 2010
• Peter Watts, Echopraxia, 2014
• Poincaré's 1904 essay on creativity is described (with extensive quotes) in this article. The original source for the essay is his book The Foundations of Science, starting on page 179, a chapter titled "Mathematical Creation". The book is freely available for Kindle and in other formats via the Wayback Machine.
• Jamis Buck, Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages, 2015
• Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software, 1996. Free at the author's site.

Credits

The image of Theseus, the spaceship in Blindsight, is from a page from Peter Watts' website. The image is not marked Creative Commons, though the whole novel is, so I'm hoping Mr. Watts won't mind.