If Your Software Won't Let me Lie (Pt II): Lying to Your Parents

Wouldn’t it be great if you could know exactly where your kids are all the time? All day, every day? Wouldn’t it be great to be sure they’re not ever getting up to anything you wouldn’t do, and they’re never in any danger… ever?

Really?

Here is an article about how parents in Japan will soon be able to monitor their kids’ whereabouts by tracking them with the GPS (Global Positioning System) device on their cellphones.

The Customer is Not Always Right

There is often a chasm of difference between what the customer thinks he wants, and what he actually wants. It’s the designer’s job to trace the customer’s expression of his needs (“I want the software to do these 25 things and be colored blue”) back to the premises, or root needs, that underlie them (“I want the software to be profitable, keep a 75% returning customer base, and look professional”).

At face value, it probably sounds like an excellent idea to most parents to be able to track the exact location of their kids 24 hours a day; they might, for example, imagine thwarting a kidnapping or a burgeoning drug addiction. Imagine a world, though, where this technology really worked and was adopted widely and used constantly. When you were a kid, did you ever sneak out? Lie about where you were spending the night? Did you go on a road-trip adventure that your parents never knew about? A disreputable party? What if you hadn’t been able to do any of those things, ever? What if you had spent your entire teenage years never once able to lie to your parents about your whereabouts? What if you yourself had to live with an entire generation of people who had never been allowed to break the rules?

That’s an exaggeration, of course. I'm just illustrating that individuation (the process by which children break from the mold of their parents’ social conditioning and experiment their way towards developing a unique self) is contingent in no small measure upon screwing up (and madly brainstorming your way out of it), breaking rules, and lying. Any software that seriously impedes kids (or anyone else) from doing these things will damage their ability to become full people who make meaningful and interesting contributions to society.


Fortunately, We’re All Brilliant Liars

The good news for kids, with respect to control technologies, is that any assortment of kids will always be smarter, quicker, and more resourceful than their parents; and they will always have access to more cutting-edge technology.

Likewise, the general human masses (kids or adults) will always find clever ways around any roadblocks that official technology produces… within weeks, usually, of the general adoption of that official technology. Any new control technology (e.g. Digital Rights Management [DRM]) takes about 1-3 year’s turnaround to move from inception to market. It takes, on the other hand, 2-4 weeks for a distributed team of 500 of the world’s bored hackers to come up with a workaround, distribute it on the net, and break the control. Is sharing protection (DRM) on copyrighted iTunes tracks bugging you? Go online and download one of a dozen third-party, free pieces of software to strip the protection from them. There are so many iTunes-hacks out there, they’re in competition with one another for sleekest user interface. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; it just is. Distributed groups of hackers are smarter, and exponentially faster, than companies or government organizations who move through formalized processes to market.

So if we can crack DRM within a month, kids will have no trouble whatsoever in getting around more intrusive control technologies. They're better with technology, and their motivation to override anything that seriously restricts their freedom is greater than our idle need to share our copyrighted iTunes tracks. This is easy to illustrate. I recently read a story about how some middle and high schools are trying to staunch the overwhelming tide of collective technology by instituting “no cellphones in school” rules; kids are already thinking of innovative ways around that. Also, I'll link again to the story about Spanish high school kids hacking each others’ cellphones to gather blackmail material on other students. Over Thanksgiving I spent a long plane ride chatting up a fairly average, hip young middle school kid who could out-talk me in processor configuration and out-code me in Visual Basic. Think that kid is going to put up with his parents (who are Luddites by comparison) tracking him with the GPS device on his cellphone?

The likely scenario is that kids will hack together a half dozen little apps you can upload to your cellphone to make your GPS broadcast coordinates of your own choosing… making it twice as easy to lie to your parents about where you are than it was before you got the GPS phone in the first place.

So, to recap: people have to be able to lie to each other, at least sometimes and under some circumstances. If you produce software that doesn’t let people lie, they’ll either not use it (e.g. presence, where we block anyone from IM who we don’t want to have full access to our daily rhythms), or they’ll hack it to pieces so that all of the validity of the data is ruined/corrupted. In other words, if you ask for too much control, and you get none; you get a wobbly system, overcompensating for the original overcompensation.


How Much Information is too Much?

Let’s break personal status information down into three categories that might be projected by social software:

1. Time Grain: frequency with which status information is updated

2. Detail: specificity of information (“at school” –vs- “In the janitor’s closet with young attractive French teacher”)

3. Level of Aggregation: high aggregation would refer to status information that reflects the status of a large group of people (“Flight 714 is over Albuquerque (and my mother is on that flight”); low aggregation information refers to three or fewer individuals (“My mother is the gift shop in the C wing of the Huston airport.”)
   

To create status-broadcasting tools that won’t cause overcompensation, you can only emphasize two of those variables at once. The more specific you get with those, the less specific you must be about the third. Some examples:

• The Weasley’s clock in the Harry Potter series, which had a hand for each family member, pointing to one of several wide, vague categories: home, school, work, in mortal peril, etc. (Note: a few years back, Microsoft research created an actual workable manifestation of this clock.) (+Aggregation [by individual], +Time Grain [updated instantly], - Detail [five broad categories])

• A technology which uses GPS to track the location of school busses (+Detail [exact location], +Time Grain [updated instantly], -Aggregation [tracks a formal group])

• Dodgeball (see previous blog entry). (+Aggregation [individual], +Detail [exact location], -Time Grain [user rarely broadcasts information, and at her own discretion])
  

The bigger or more formalized the group you’re paying attention to, the more constantly and specifically you can broadcast information about it without major sociological backlash. The more individual or personal the information, though, the more vital it becomes to allow people to obscure the truth about themselves—to whom they chose, and when they chose.

If parents demand GPS tracking for their kids, companies will produce the functionality and it will sell. It just won't last or work very well; it will send the social system into a couple of wild swings, and then die out. Digital solutions that are actually going to last and incorporate themselves into the fibre of social life just have to incorporate themselves into our prexisting social patterns. As before: the nature of our relationships has to define the interface, not the other way around.

Norman L. Johnson: Remember his Name (Fame!)

Terms:

• Agent: one entity in a collective group of entities that are doing something together. Agent-based models attempt to simulate how entities with (maybe) unique characteristics (like individuals in a crowd) move and make decisions together to produce unexpected collective results (like rioting).
• Resilience or Robustness: the ability of a system to spring back from external disturbances (e.g. a city design is robust if the city can continue to function even after a bomb destroys 15% of the central streets and buildings).
• System: A group of components working together in an organically-organized way (maybe) to operate as a collective entity with its own unique nature. Examples: the body of a bird, or a public school. This is a larger topic which I’ll address in a future post.

Ok, this is really disturbing. Lots of people do not seem to know about Norman L. Johnson. Even my friend who arguably knows way more than me about social systems has, reportedly, not heard of him.

Inconceivable! Norman L. Johnson produces fantastic stuff. He’s a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Even intermediate-level readers can get usable fundamental conceptual building blocks r.e. systems theory and collective intelligence from his papers.

Here, for example is a reference to his work on the uses of diversity in social systems. (The following explanation refers to an article that I’m pulling out of my memory, not specifically to what’s in that link, so there may be some incongruencies.) Johnson shows that systems move through three lifestyle phases, where they show varying degrees of productivity and robustness.

When I reference these concepts in conversation (which I do a lot); I typically use the example of a social system of house builders. Here is how that system might evolve:

1. Formative (infant) stage:

You pluck 30 house builders out of the ether, throw them together in the woods, and tell them to start building 2-bedroom, 1-story houses.

These individuals (or "agents") haven’t worked together before. Their roles aren’t defined (What are my duties?), their relationships aren’t defined (Who do I like? Who do I take orders from?), and the process itself isn’t defined (What materials? What layout?). This system of people will build fairly mediocre houses (poor productivity), but will be highly creative (everything is experimentation until something works), and very robust (change the circumstances, change the goals, and they can easily switch gears).

2. Mature stage:

The same builders have been working together for six months.

They’ve done this enough that they’ve established some processes that work. Joe mans the nailgun. Mary monitors the resources. Barry lifts the heavy stuff. Alice and Bill don’t work together or they bicker. However, not all of the combinations of roles, relationships, and system processes have been tried yet, so experimentation is still taking place. Thus, this system of agents is now fairly productive (but not maximally productive), but still pretty robust. If you suddenly swap out 30% of the workers with new people, the group can still shuffle itself around and adapt.

3. Senescent (geriatric) stage:

The same builders have been working together on the same project, in the same environment, for ten years.

This group is incredibly efficient. They have tried everything, and they now know the optimal, maximally-productive way of producing 2-bedroom, 1-story houses in the woods. They know exactly what their roles are when they show up to work without thinking about it at all; they haven’t had to experiment in years. The tradeoff for this productivity is a sore deficiency in robustness. If you up and airlift this crew to New Mexico and tell them "Now build me 4-bedroom, 2-story houses in the desert," they will just plain fail. The system will break.

You can use these simple concepts to extraordinary effect in interpreting the behavior of, for example, neural nets, agent-based models, or your local PTA meetings.

Here are lots of Norman L. Johnson's publications. His credentials are scary-impressive, but his writing is sublimely intelligible and accessible to Even Normal People Like You. I’ll probably be cracking some of his articles back open and overviewing them here (eventually).

So that's who Norman L. Johnson is. All right? All right.

Metacognition: Helping People be Stupid in Public Forums

As of this entry, I’ll be kicking off posts by summarizing any new vocab words up front for newbies; other folks can scan past them.

• Newbie (or n00b): a newcomer to a field. Internet lingo term used sometimes amiably, sometimes as a pejorative. : )
• Meta: a tricky concept. A “meta” idea is, roughly, an idea that is about a subset of itself. For example, “How Joe writes blogs” is meta to its subset, which is “how Joe’s Dec 11, 2006 blog entry is written.” The first sentence in this entry (about putting term definitions in blog entries) is meta to this list.
• Metacognition: the study of how we think (i.e. thinking about how you think about things). When you take classes on how to study, or meditate to observe and silence your thoughts, that’s a metacognitive process.

Metacognition is particularly interesting to social systems folks, because we treat crowds as a kind of semi-thinking organism which may be influenced and eventually trained. When an individual learns how to learn (i.e. gets meta to learning), he greatly magnifies his operational intelligence. When an individual learns how people learn, or how they reason or make decisions, she becomes able to create very influential (even Machiavellian) political policy, for example, or social software.

I recently stumbled on an excellent, highly intelligible blog called Creating Passionate Users. It focuses on metacognition, with an emphasis on using metacognitive tools to achieve goals in various computer/network applications.

Last week (Dec 3) featured an interesting post is called How to Build a User Community (pt 1) by Kathy Sierra. Sierra proposes a way to encourage participants to stay active, learn, and feel needed in online user forums as those people move slowly up the ranks of expertise. It could, though, just as easily be applied in a number of other organizational situations.

Her suggestions focus around encouraging late-beginner-to-intermediate users to try to answer (the inevitable flood of) newbie questions in public forums, without fear of being looked at as foolish if their answers are wrong. I like this: it’s an approach that encourages smooth and circular information flow, while capitalizing on some inherent human drives (to not look stupid or be irritating, to participate, to be useful.)

Here are her main points; see the blog for a full explanation. There’s also a lengthy scroll of reader discussion at the bottom.

1. Encourage newer users–especially those who’ve been active askers–to start trying to answer questions
2. Give tips on how to answer questions
3. Tell them it’s OK to guess a little, as long as they ADMIT they’re guessing
4. Adopt a near-zero-tolerance “Be Nice” policy when people answer questions
5. Teach and encourage the more advanced users (including moderators) how to correct a wrong answer while maintaining the original answerer’s dignity.
6. Re-examine your reward/levels strategy for your community