Take the end user with a grain of salt

"If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

-Henry Ford

The Honda story

This is an anecdote about Honda passed on by one of the professors of my innovation class. I haven't independently verified its accuracy (ELFS), but here it is anyway.

The story goes that Honda was studying how to penetrate the American car market. They sent over some analysts to probe the situation and do some market research. They failed. They could find no way to interest Americans in Honda cars. They gave up. Just before they were scheduled to leave, one of these analysts goes shopping on his little Honda motorbike, and a randomly-encountered random stranger saw this bike and exclaimed surprise and admiration for this novel piece of small-bike engineering. No one had seen anything quite like it.

The analyst was hit with an idea. Perhaps the way in to America was not through cars, which had been the plan, but through little motorcycles.

And the rest is automotive history.

Ben Franklin in Stockholm

The reciprocity norm, tit for tat, the golden rule, the many names of the basic decency in us. At the same time a bayesian-evolutionary cooperative Nash equilibrium to which we have successfully converged.

The rule of reciprocation gives us a strong gut feeling that good deeds ought to be returned, which results in community cohesion and competitive advantage for a group, a society and a whole species. Those who only take and never give are usually hated, punished and ostracized (unless they manage to go unobserved).

Just as our preference for sweet-tasting food (ripe fruits) has been hijacked by the chocolate industry, our reciprocation sense is ruthlessly exploited by marketers, salespeople and master negotiators. When we taste a food sample from the supermarket, we feel obliged to buy something, or at least to listen carefully to the sales pitch. When we get a candy with the receipt, we feel obliged to buy more next time, even if we know it is a cheap trick. When we are flattered, we are more likely to give favors even though we claim to be rational and just. To avoid being seen (or seeing oneself) as ingrate or as a moocher, we overcompensate and engage in disproportionate reciprocation to the great satisfaction of waiters and cab drivers.

People are nice: researchers sent out "Merry Christmas" postcards to random strangers, and got enthusiastic replies from a significant portion of them. Many of the recipients added them to their list of friends to send postcards to on all occasions (this was before people got used to spam).

Nothing revolutionary so far, just Marketing and Psychology 101. The surprise lies in a more subtle and somewhat contradictory phenomenon, the Ben Franklin effect.

An acute observer, Benjamin Franklin noticed that political opponents became more sympathetic and easier to persuade if at some point he asked them a small favor, such as to borrow a book from them. They were both flattered and comforted by the fact that Ben Franklin owed them a book/favor.

Distilled in B.F.'s own words:

He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

The psychological explanation is that people engage in post hoc rationalizing: "Why did I do a favor to this person ?" "It must be because I like him so much."

The effect readily explains a large number of social phenomena and has been tried experimentally: participants in an experiment were given cash reward. After the experiment the professor asked some participants (randomly selected) to give back the reward (on some made up grounds). Most of them complied. In a later study, those who were asked to give the money back were found to have a much better opinion of the professor than those who were not asked such favor.

At an extreme, this might explain the Stockholm-syndrome as well (where captives become sympathetic to their captors).

If one can prepare to defend against an exploit of the reciprocation norm, by simply not asking or accepting favors, the Ben Franklin effect is devastating: you ask me a small favor in order to ask a greater one later and I will gladly comply. You abuse me, and I'll love you even more. A tragic corollary of this effect is that in war we end up hating our victims. The more innocent they are, the more negative our feelings become.

But how can both effects work at the same time, how can they be reconciled when there is seemingly a contradiction ? Are there some cases in which one is stronger than the other ?
Does it depend on whether the favor is asked for or not, or on some other variable ? Are there personality types more vulnerable to one or the other ? How to prepare against being tricked by car-salesmen who use one of these effects ? Where is a resident psychologist when we need one ?

Science and fundraising

A candid piece in PLoS Biology about grantsmanship and its ills, the stifling of creativity due to insecurity and poor criteria for evaluating proposals etc.

Borges the post-modern

Revisiting Borges (previous visit), a hilarious short story is Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote (link to Engl. translation).

It is the fictitious inventory and literary criticism of the lifework of a certain symbolist poet, Pierre Menard. The author has left behind many works, for example:

e) A technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess, eliminating one of the rook’s pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation.

However, most notable is his "Don Quixote" which is (spoiler alert) a word-by-word recreation of Cervantes' original.

So the critique goes:

In spite of these three obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What a series of espagnolades that selection would have suggested to Maurice Barrès or Dr. Rodríguez Larreta! Menard eludes them with complete naturalness. In his work there are no gypsy flourishes or conquistadors or mystics or Philip the Seconds or autos da fé. He neglects or eliminates local color. This disdain points to a new conception of the historical novel. This disdain condemns Salammbô, with no possibility of appeal.

just to build up for the main pun:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.”

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.”

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

With this 1939 piece, says the anonymous expert from wikipedia:

Borges anticipates the post-modern theory that gives centrality to reader response [citation needed].

Taxonomy of technical results

ok, ok, I'm back ...

here's a proposed taxonomy of technical results / scientific papers:

a technical result is a(n)
elegant/ugly
solution/non-solution to a(n)
difficult/easy
problem/non-problem.

We all hope (imagine?) to be producing elegant solutions to difficult problems, when more often we create ugly non-solutions to easy non-problems.

Is there any part of the science landscape not fitting onto this chart ?

How to motivate creatives?

This has become something of a recurring theme in our discussions. Anyway, here are two links addressing the aspects of creative work environments some of us seek and wish to create.

This and this.