407 karma · joined April 24, 2007
http://dscottphoenix.com/
If we are to invest in basic science, it seems like more could be accomplished by understanding how beliefs are formed, and how beliefs map to behavior. With this understanding, we could shape society so that people grow up to be more rational and altruistic, and thus far more interested in spending $10 on life extension than on lottery tickets.
From another angle, most premature death in the US occurs from diseases of behavior. We could extend a lot of lives if we understood why most people pick short term payoffs (McDonalds, TV) instead of long term payoffs (vegetables, exercise).
1. More rigorously define what "improve" means. Beliefs about what an ideal world would be varies drastically between people and cultures. To avoid the "colonize the savages / white man's burden" problem, we need a framework for discussing and evaluating goodness in a more rigorous way, especially one that is viewer independent, cultureless, and timeless. In the 14th century, people lit dogs and cats on fire for amusement. This sort of thing would be greeted with horror by many people today. I wonder what we're doing now that people from the future will view with similar disgust.
2. Identify the behaviors / beliefs / etc that prevent such a world from existing now. It seems likely to me that this will involve formulating a scientifically falsifiable model for how people adopt and change beliefs and behaviors. It's not clear how much precision will be attainable for a model this. It could be that we are only ever able to understand very generally which stimuli or environmental conditions will give a higher probability of shifting individuals towards certain behaviors and traits (eg, empowered analytical altruism). We can then identify the levers that cause this shift to occur, eg altering what children are taught at school.
In a nutshell:
1. [if possible] More rigorously define what good world(s) would look like.
2. [if possible] Figure out a model for belief and behavior selection that can be applied to causing / raising people to come to adopt behaviors and beliefs that bring about this better world.
In my spare time, researching how to catalyze mass behavior change to improve society.
Dan was an amazing guy, and I only saw a tiny fraction of his light. The world needs more Dans.
I think the better lesson is to tailor your messaging to your target buyer. If you're selling to a level III coder at a big company, put the message in a form (s)he will like.
1. We only used code from the guy who won, and he never saw the other submissions.
2. The interview project was time boxed to 24 hours. The guy who won did it in about 9 hours.
The actual feature is big, and has lots of edge cases: our devices need to be able to update themselves when new versions become available, roll back if there's an error, archive past versions, and never, ever end up in a state where they're bricked. The applicants did a small toy implementation of this functionality. The guy who won wrote good enough initial code to be used as a foundation for the rest.
Transformers, indeed.
I always find it unsettling when I see demos of "new user interface technology" that involves people performing tasks that seem primarily designed to look visually impressive and only secondarily (if at all) are related to a task someone would actually want to accomplish.
Show me how this can help me work faster. I'm currently unconvinced that this system is superior to a mouse + keyboard. I'm not even convinced that the demo tasks couldn't have been completed just as easily using keyboard shortcuts and a mouse.
Used them for years. Fantastic quality, inexpensive.