“quote collages”

I believe that an interface that is both modeless and, insofar as possible, monotonous—all other design features being of at least normal quality for a modern interface—would be extraordinarily pleasant to use. A user would be able to develop an unusually high degree of trust in his habits. The interface would, from these two properties alone, tend to fade from the user’s consciousness, allowing him to give his full attention to the task at hand. The psychological effects of totally (or near totally) modeless and monotonous systems is an area of interface design ripe for experimental study.

If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monotony would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product. Its users would find moving to a competitor’s product psychologically difficult. Unlike selling illicit drugs, marketing an addictive interface is legal, and the product is beneficial to its users; in another way, it is just like selling illicit drugs: extremely profitable.

There’s an old story about two men on a train. One of them, seeing some naked-looking sheep in a field, said, “Those sheep have just been sheared.’; The other looked a moment longer, and then said, “They seem to be— on this side.” It is in such a cautious spirit that we should say whatever we have to say about the workings of the mind.

Two Englishmen are going by train. A conversation isn’t getting on. The train passes a meadow, on which a herd of sheeps pastures. One of the passengers says:

—1356.

The other man is surprised, but gives no answer. In some time the train passes another pasture. The first passenger says:

—1693.

His neighbor brakes and asks:

—Sir, our train moves at speed 60 miles per hour. How can you count so quickly?

—Oh, sir, it’s very simple! First I count a quantity of legs in a herd and then I divide this number by four.

In a book aptly called New Bottles for New Wine, Julian Huxley^WP quotes his grandfather, the great nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley^WP, on the subject of belief: ”Everyone should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him. My faith is in human possibilities.”

Teaching can be done in a much more conditional way.. Children are usually taught “this is a pen,” “this is a rose,” “this is a car.” It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category “pen.” But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that “this could be a pen”? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child “this is a pen.” What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: “This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass”? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island (when the fork and screwdriver could double as tent pegs for the sheet, near a fire made by the magnifying glass)? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child initially taught “a family’ is, a mother, a father, and a child” versus “a family could be…”

A dolphin’s ability to invent novel behaviours was put to the test in a famous experiment by the renowned dolphin expert Karen Pryor. Two rough-toothed dolphins were rewarded whenever they came up with a new behaviour. It took just a few trials for both dolphins to realise what was required. A similar trial was set up with humans. The humans took about as long to realise what they were being trained to do as did the dolphins. For both the dolphins and the humans, there was a period of frustration (even anger, in the humans) before they “caught on”. Once they figured it out, the humans expressed great relief, whereas the dolphins raced around the tank excitedly, displaying more and more novel behaviours.

Conceptualization is man’s method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one’s perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.

Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without specifying their measurements, which vary from case to case. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.”

Bach also spoke of the effortless flow of musical ideas. Asked how he found his melodies, he said, “The problem is not finding them, it’s—when getting up in the morning and getting out of bed—not stepping on them.”

Perhaps the week’s biggest and scariest robot news, though—certainly for journalists—was the robot reporters story.

Thomson Financial has been using automatic computer programs to generate news stories for almost six months. The machines can spit out wire-ready copy based on financial reports a mere 0.3 seconds after receiving the data. Thomson management likes its reporter robots so much that it has decided to expand the fleet.

Flesh-and-blood journalists were quick to decry the move. “Those editors who can’t wait to install computers at the expense of journalists should beware,” warned Mark Tran in the Guardian article “Robots write the news.”

“Look at what happened in Space Odyssey, when HAL took over the spaceship. Or worse still, think of Terminator 3, when the Skynet network of computers unleashes nuclear war.”

Tran was joking. Well, half joking. But his joke was also a poignant plea. A robot may be able to turn a share report into three pithy paragraphs in less than a second, but it can’t go and watch movies about other robots and turn that into a warning for the world.

Because it can’t live, it can’t think. Or so we think. Tran’s conclusion isn’t very reassuring. “We endangered financial journalists could prolong our lives in the short term by slapping more adjectives into our copy,” he suggests, “but the writing does seem to be on the wall, as far as earnings reports go.” If all that stands between a writer’s job and redundancy is a few adjectives, well, that’s plain scary.

”Scary”—yes, nice adjective. It’s got human emotion, empathy, experience. Good, we’re still on the right side of the Turing Test the side the robots can’t get to.

Or can they? I can hear the laments already, with 20/20 hindsight. First they came for the bomb disposal crews, and we said nothing. Then they were spot-welding and spray-painting on the auto plant assembly lines, and still we said nothing. Only now that they’ve come for the journalism jobs do the journalists scream. But it’s too late.

Mistrust and paranoia have set in. How do we know Mark Tran isn’t already a robot? “Tran”—does that even sound like a human name?

It’s a losing battle. These days, it seems, there are fewer and fewer jobs a robot couldn’t do. Even automatic translation, which some said only humans could do properly (because meaning requires context and context requires lived experience) is coming on by leaps and bounds, pulling jobs out from under the feet of the lower-level human translators.

A 1999 study of professional soccer players suggests that they owe their success more to training than to talent. In Germany, Brazil, Japan and Australia, the players were much more likely than average to have been born in the first quarter (Q1) after the cutoff date for youth soccer leagues.. Because these players were older than their teammates when they joined the leagues, they would have enjoyed advantages in size and strength, allowing them to handle the ball and score more often. Their success in early years would have motivated them to keep improving, thus explaining their disproportionate representation in the professional leagues.

NOTE: The cutoff dates were August 1 for Germany, Brazil and Australia, and April 1 for Japan.

Don’t believe a word of what you read in this essay on the childhood influences that led me to become a scientist. Don’t believe a word of what you read in the other essays, either. One of the curses of being an experimental psychologist is the habit of scrutinizing one’s own mental processes. Recounting childhood influences is a mental process no less subject to quirks and errors than falling for the visual illusions on the back of a cereal box. Everything I know about the recollection of childhood influences makes me approach this assignment with misgivings..

In a classic 1977 review, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson argued that many of the causes of our choices never enter our consciousness. Here is a simple example. If you present people with an array of articles of clothing and ask them to pick one to keep, they tend to pick the rightmost one. But if you then ask them to list the reasons they chose that article, no one says, “Because it was the one on the right.” They cite only the features of the objects themselves. Not having served in experiments in which the same items were presented in different orders, people have no grounds for knowing that a dumb factor like left-to-right position could be a cause of their behavior. And that’s a major problem for memories of what influenced us: None of us has taken part in the experiments that would isolate the causes of our choices in life.

[Ultimately,] chance must play an enormous role in development. We might be shaped by whether an axon zigged or zagged as our brains jelled in the womb, whether we got the top bunk or the bottom bunk, whether we were dropped on our head, whether we inhaled a virus. Needless to say, few people cite factors like these among their childhood influences..