BluePojo

Twitter is different

Today, I received a personal message from Ramit Sethi.  A few weeks ago, I received a personal (direct) message from Penelope Trunk.  Additionally, Robert Scoble has sent me personal messages as well.  Even further, several times I have had my messages relayed to hundreds of thousands of people by Scoble and others.

This hasn’t been possible in the past.  Think back to before the internet… or hell, think back to just before Twitter.  How could you get in touch with anyone who is considered “famous”?  Emailing them was/is a waste.  Trying to get their autograph at a show was/is all you could hope for.  The only pseudo-successful means available to the random individual was when bands or other famous figures would have special offers if you join their VIP fan club at the cost of however much money, so you could get invited to a “Meet and Greet” which mostly consisted of a single handshake and a “hello.”

With Twitter, however… I ask a question, and it gets answered.  I post a message, and my followers see it, among which are people such as Robert Scoble and Hiten Shah.  It’s a minimal time investment due to the limitation on characters in a tweet, so my messages are not regarded as time-wasting fan-service.  Their responses are also limited to the classic 140 characters, so replying is not a grand investment for them, either.

Twitter is a direct connection to people who could not possibly have time to notice me otherwise.  That’s a lot better than nothing.

#differenttwitter @bluepojo

Why your accent makes me think you're stupid

If you have an accent from Chester, PA, I’m going to notice.  The first time you say any word with an “ow” sound, I’ll know where you grew up.  Additionally, I’m going to judge you for it, and will assume you’re less intelligent than someone with a West Chester accent, for instance.  The same goes for if you’re overweight, or drive by in a Cadillac Escalade with the windows down blasting bass-heavy music.  You’re immediately starting out on a lower tier in my evaluation cycle than others without those features.

This is because I am superficial. That’s easy for me to admit to, because you are superficial, too.

Study marketing for a term, and you’ll realize that we’re remarkably superficial.  Your job as a marketer is to take advantage of the superficial channels we leave open to the world.  Does Michael Jordan know more about underwear than you do? Hell no.  Does his advertisements about Hanes brand underwear work? Hell yes.

To take this a step further, why is wearing a suit important?

“Well,” says your SVP of Finance at Supercorp A, “a suit shows that you are a professional. It shows you know how to take care of yourself.”

Does that make sense?  Does wearing a suit show that you know how to maintain the human body?  I’d argue the opposite.  For a simple example, the shoes a person wears with a suit are precisely the opposite of what the human body needs.  Take a look at these pictures, comparing someone who’s lived their life barefoot with one who wears proper shoes daily.

The second image is simply unnatural, but is the state of most humans’ feet with these modern ideas of what shoes should be.  Clearly this is not a means of “taking care of yourself.”

What is it, then? Why do we need suits to be “professional”?  It’s a means of intercepting superficial evaluations. So prevalent are these superficial evaluations that wearing a suit has become the standard means of proving you are a “professional.”

Why is being superficial a bad thing? It’s obviously an irrational means of evaluating a person.  ”Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” has become a mantra of moms trying to teach their kids not to be superficial.  Is being irrational a poor way to live your life?  The answer seems obvious, but lets take a second look:

What is lost by being superficial?

• Opportunities to encounter superficially boring, yet actually interesting people or situations will be missed almost 100% of the time.
• Being superficial, while natural, is still regarded as a bad thing by general society, so social status will slip.

What is gained by being superficial?

• Time. One can make superficial judgements very quickly, as no real data is needed.

So if we lose the first two only to gain some time, why are we naturally superficial?  Reverse the situation and see what the result is: imagine humans are naturally deep about everything.

Every day decisions will begin taking much more time.  Choosing which cereal you wish to eat every morning will be a bit of an ordeal of comparing nutrients available from both, examining gathered data from previous experience in eating that particular meal, with relation to what you plan to eat during the rest of the day, as well as time of year and current health.  Selecting which shoes you wish to wear will require you to examine what surfaces you intend to walk on, as well as your normal gait with relation to how well the tread on the shoes will adjust to each of the varying surfaces you will walk on in the coming hours at work.  Choosing which email to read first will require you to examine the subject title as well as the sender, compared with the timestamp to evaluate which email will be best to read first.

Deciding whether to go out on a date with someone will be an arduous process.  Information about the person you are evaluating will not be readily available, so you, after applying some risk analysis, will likely never date anyone until you know them very very well, due to the high probability that the date will go poorly.

Now compare this situation with someone who evaluates things superficially.

The cereal you eat is decided based on the color of the box, and how good the picture is on the front of the box. You select your shoes based on what color they are, and whether you usually wear them on a normal day, regardless of where you are going, generally. You read your emails top to bottom, or perhaps you read ones that have friendly sounding titles first.  You pick dates based on how cute the chick is, something that takes less than a few seconds to decide.

Now, who is accomplishing more?  The superficial person is accomplishing more, because every day decisions don’t need such deep evaluation.  By the time the “always deep” person picks their cereal, the second is out the door, doing more important things… the things they intend to spend their deep thoughts on.

Being superficial is a defense against wasted time.

When to be deep.

We’re obviously not always superficial.  When and why do we switch gears then? Being superficial does not prove beneficial when, for instance, we’re trying to win a game of Warhammer.  Warhammer requires much evaluation of both the opposing army and opposing player, predicting how they’ll move and how you’ll counter them.  Why am I compelled to switch gears and evaluate in more detail when playing Warhammer or doing Linear Algebra homework, but I am not compelled to when picking my shoes?

The easy answer is that it interests me, but there’s got to be more to it than that.

The reason Warhammer interests me is because I can see the end result of what I am pursuing: victory.  I have won games before, so I know what feelings are evoked when I run the opponent’s general off the board, and I am drawn to them.  I know there’s only one way to achieve said feelings, and so I play through the game against competent opponents to get there.

The real distinction is the clearness of the results of being superficial or deep in a given situation.  Some people do deep evaluations of what cereal they eat in the morning, but this is because it interests them.  It interests them, because they can see the result of eating well, and they are drawn to it. They are willing to trade the time saved by being superficial for the benefit gained by achieving the goals they can visualize of eating well.  Additionally, after some practice and habit forming, making deep decisions about things that interest you will slowly take less and less time, another goal which some people are able to visualize and others are not.

Ultimately: being superficial is not a bad thing, always. It allows you to make respectable and predictable decisions without taking time away from the things you are interested in.  When you are interested, also known as being able to clearly visualize the end result of investing the time required to do a deep evaluation, then being deep is a natural state of mind.

Because I am not a very social person, I have no need to relate to a remarkable number of people.  It does not benefit me to be more than superficial when I first meet people, as it will take time away from things I am interested in.

The same goes for you, too, just for other situations.  Further, it goes to prove that companies that require you to wear a suit are also ones that cater to the superficiality of their employees. I’m a software engineer. I don’t own a suit.  If you’re in sales or marketing, however, you’d better wear a suit. Your job description is the same as the suit’s.

#imnotsodeep @bluepojo

My own little world is different than yours.

I have only a few good friends, and I like that. I ride a bike that’s nearly 20 years old with downtube shifters, made by a company you can’t even find on Google, and I don’t own a car.

I’m American, my wife is Indian.

My dog is a pitbull mixed with dalmation.

I do horribly geeky things, like Warhammer.

I cook and maintain the house, rather than my wife.  I intend to build a castle some day. I’m a Software Engineer.

And… this is my world. I get the impression that everyone can write a list like the above, focusing on the things they don’t see other people do. Generally, most will enjoy putting together such a list, just like I did.

And this is silly, right? Why do humans take pleasure in being different? Computers, for example, excel when they do everything the same, provided the same is good enough.  A computer that can communicate with another using a given protocol is a good computer, and 2 computers running the same program can parallelize their results for more efficiency.  Clearly humans are not different for the sake of efficiency, however, so why are they different?

Why do humans care about diversity in life and experience?  Why do we shiver with adrenaline when a lone archer holds the line against charging Chaos Chosen Knights, or when a charging unit of Wild Riders causes the opposing general’s unit to flee in fear in a game of Warhammer?  Why are we compelled to build machines of increasing complexity, such as each year’s iteration of computers and cars?  Is it not enough just to survive and reproduce?  A superficial look at evolution would indicate that everything else is tertiary, and yet we’re driven by more than food and sex. Well. Most of us are.

I don’t have answers, really.  I don’t know what makes us build buildings taller and taller, or why we care whether a piece of furniture is shaped just so for aesthetic purposes at the expense of comfort.

I don’t know why I appreciate maneuvering a dinosaur named Yoshi in a go kart around a fanciful track, while hurling turtle shells at my opponents.

I just know that I do.

I suppose this is the whole purpose of why psychologists do what they do, eh?

#littleworld @bluepojo

Stolen Bike

Tonight, my bike was stolen.

I don’t know by whom, or for what reason, or if I ever will know, but all I have left is the Kryptonite lock that I used to keep it safe, left locked to the tree where my bike was only a few hours ago.  I don’t know if was that I didn’t lock it properly, or if someone was able to unlock it some how, or how they possibly disconnected my bike from it’s lock, but the short story is: it’s gone.

I really really like that bike.  It’s a 55cm white 2009 Specialized Sirrus. I’ll be hoping there’s a chance I can get it back.

The irony is that it was locked up to a tree literally 100ft from the entrance to the Drexel Police Station.  Fortunately the officer I spoke with said it was likely caught on camera, so I may get lucky.  Who knows.

Avatar and Social Activism

Humans wish they could live like the Na’vi.  There is some deep carnal desire to live in tune with nature, taking only what you can give back, using only what is necessary to survive.  Humans want to be able to scientifically prove that God exists, even if that God is a neural network housed inside a planet called Pandora.  Everyone wants to fly.

Everyone enjoys absorbing the visually stunning landscapes that make up Pandora.

The thing is: Earth is not too far off.

…if we just know where to look.  Humans want these things, but humans are notoriously lazy, easily distracted, and naive.  Your average human is a slave to whatever is put in front of him: a television, a drink, a market that obscures how much is lost to produce what we throw away in minutes.

How are humans broken from their lazy, distracted naivete? Basically: they’re not. Hit them with what they’re slave to to make them move in a direction that’ll hurt them less than their current one.  A quote of which I’ve lost the source and exact wording says essentially: “Give me your music and I will drive the future of your society.”  The path humans take is inevitably driven by the things that entertain them.  Politicians are just along for the ride.

How do we bring humans back to what they need, on their base level? Remind them what they need through what they don’t, or to put it another way, create more movies like Avatar, where the pain felt by the imagined Na’vi on screen when a small animal dies reminds people that what they see is a distant echo of the pain that should be felt by those who see the state of the Earth today.

Global warming, buzzword2 or buzzword3 etc. etc. whatever.  This is the nth state beyond the state of a healthy, balanced world.  We shouldn’t be discussing whether now is the right time to stop destroying Earth.  We should be in full action with the understanding that we passed the point of “too much” well before our current generation.

After all: compare the effectiveness of Avatar to telling people to get rid of their dog: http://bit.ly/6ILylE

Discuss: #avatar @bluepojo