Month: October 2009

You’re only as good as your tools.

I went to a BarCamp at a conference last night. I ended up talking to a group of people who deal with big companies and IT tools. I’m surprised at how IT decisions are made, and the shaky ground that they’re based on. This, of course, causes lots of awful problems.

Companies used to exist based on the skills of the people behind them. It was 100% human operation — being able to process and manage the information about the company, and make good decisions on it. Now, it seems like a company’s ability to exist and function is based on the ability to represent their information cleanly and accurately in a computer system.

Lots of companies seem to buy premade software that does what they need, with *just a little* customizing. Which an outside consultant (ie: not familiar with the business) will do.

What kills me is that this means paying for lots of stuff that doesn’t get used, or gets used wrong. The software itself is more expensive to develop up front, not to mention the costs of maintaining, upgrading, and lost productivity because things don’t work right.

Imagine a large software product like a busy restaurant kitchen. Different parts of the system are running all over the place, grabbing different things, changing them in various ways, and sending them out to the user. Now imagine that same busy kitchen with a big box of camping gear dumped in the middle of the room, in case someone needs the Camping 2.0 featureset. And a box of hoses, in case you need Water 3.5 compatibility. Next thing you know, garden hose is wrapped around the ankle of the head chef; he’s spilling the bouillabaisse on the soux chef (who was hiding in a tent); and it takes forever just to get some eggs and toast. Which you are grateful for when it finally arrives.

It’s a waste of resources, and has nothing on a kitchen where everyone knows exactly where everything is, and can move around cleanly.

Bringing this back to software, it’s why there are enterprise (“expensive”) systems out there that can only support 8 concurrent users on a server at one time. If I delivered a product that used a whole computer for 8 people, just to display some bits of text, I would fire myself and get a job at the M&M factory putting them in alphabetical order.

The whole point of this technology crap is to make things that make you more effective. Force multipliers, they call them. We need to make damn good force multipliers. That’s the only way anything is worth anything anymore. The most accurate rifleman equipped with a watergun will be much less effective than a jittery guy with a good rifle and scope.

You’re only as good as your tools.

Be lucky

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Be lucky — it’s an easy skill to learn

timsez: I’m a big believer than there are a lot of learnable skills out there, and most people just assume that “oh, you’re either born that way or you’re not” (link via the most excellent Rahmin)

Understanding Science

I love Science. I think that sharing knowledge and testing ideas against the real world are great ways to find truth.

But, I think Science is really misunderstood. From the evolution-creationism “debate” to “are eggs good for you?”, Science really takes some learning and education to figure out what’s meaningful and what’s bullshit.

When you see something like “Scientists discover fat gene”, what does that really mean? The average person thinks “oh, fat is genetic”, but is that really true? Sometimes, news people report a headline that says “Scientists discover fat gene”, but what actually happened was that some PhD student noticed that people with a certain gene tend to be fat, and wrote a paper. Doesn’t mean it’s right — it means someone turned in their homework.

This is something that’s bugged me for a while. If I had millions of dollars, I would probably spend some of it helping do PR for Science. Key people like teachers, news reporters, and politicians should not be scientific experts, but should understand how to ask questions of scientists and how to make decisions based on scientific information, without being thrown off by bullshit.

The real problem is that this isn’t easy to do. I don’t think anyone’s really figured out how to make the knowledge quickly digestible. The goal should be to make the principles obvious and unambiguous.

I think this article does a very good job on how to evaluate scientific articles about health, which need to be very rigorous, because they can literally result in life-or-death decisions. A lot of the principles in it can be carried over to other scientific disciplines: http://www.badscience.net/2009/09/how-to-read-articles-about-health-by-dr-alicia-white/

This is a cool resource, but I don’t think it’s useful unless you already understand the point of journals and peer review: http://eigenfactor.org/map/