Reason is Treason

by Kasabian from Kasabian

Hello again from yet another long blog break. As expected I have quite a lot of talk about so be prepared for yet another long patented rambling rant about several subjects. And away we go....

This past month or so, it has really hit home the reason why what I do for a living is important. First off is that I attended the CHI conference this past April in Atlanta, GA. The best thing about conferences is meeting up with old friends, colleagues, professors, students, etc. The HCI community it still rather small (or should I say communal) so it is easy to run into someone you know or someone's whose work you are familiar with. It is sometimes surreal to bump into some you used to work with, talking with someone you went to school with, who is then joined by someone who used to be your intern. I won't bore the non-HCI readers of this blog with the details of the talks - other than I unusually picked 3 stinkers of talks in a row on the second day of the conference and then went to 3 really good talks in a row on the third day. Karma at work I suppose.

I did get a chance to check out Atlanta though which was great since the weather was awesome. A bunch of us went on a special trip to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), made famous by the movie Outbreak and the killer monkey, which is headquartered out here. The highlight of the trip was seeing their operations center, which you may expect to be something like the TV show 24 with huge monitors on the wall a lots of workers sitting in rows of desks monitoring potential disease emergencies. And you would be correct. I am not kidding, it looks exactly like that. Which is cool but I really wished there was a big round table like in Dr. Strangelove. We did get to see their video conference room which had one of those cool glass window and doors that turned opaque when you pressed a button. Apparently, it is filled with some sort of gas that reacts to an electrical current. I also got a chance to see the World of Cola aka the Coke Museum. Yeah, I know it is a glorious ode to capitalistic, materialism and overall ugly Americanism of today's global economy. But gosh darn it, it's fun to look at. I have to admit I enjoyed it a lot. I even got my picture taken with the Coke Polar bear but then I lost by picture code :-( I also did go to the very famous coke tasting room where there were 64 different coke brands. I didn't drink all 64 since I didn't want to be wired out of my mind. But I had this Kiwi Mango soda they sell in South Africa and I have to say it was quite tasty. Much in contrast to the carrot flavored soda they sell in Japan, which was quite expectedly disgusting.

Amazingly one of the best things out of the whole trip was the conference key note. It was given by Genevieve Bell from Intel who argued that as a research community we have utterly failed to seriously research several basic things important to most human beings such as sex, politics, death, religion, and sports. Most of the academic community tends to shy away from these subjects because (a) they are icky and cause people to be uncomfortable and/or (b) they seem trivial compared to things like hospitals, fortune 500 companies, and government. But Bell made the really salient point that things like sports and religion have way more influence in peoples' live and its shame we, meaning the HCI and other academic communities, don't give them their due.

This point really hit home when I saw this show on PBS called Mind Over Money. It's essentially a show which tries to figure out how much emotion plays in financial decision making and ergo what role it had in last financial crisis. It was a study of two schools of thought - the rationalists based out of the University of Chicago who believe in the utmost power of free markets versus the behaviorists who believe that markets are made up of people and therefore can be subject to great irrationality as a result. It is pretty clear to almost everyone that the last financial crisis was driven by a great deal of irrationality and emotional behavior on all sides. People took out mortgages they had no way of repaying, banks gave loans to people who should have never received one, financial institutions bundled all these loans/mortgages into mind numbing complex structures that they traded and assigned values to that in reality had no relation to their actual worth. Essentially, either everybody deluded themselves into thinking housing prices would never fall or that everyone thought they were smart enough to get off the runaway train before it crashed. Either way and given all this evidence, you would think the rationalists would reluctantly admit that their idea that markets will always self regulate themselves is not always right. Nope, they blindly believe that their rational market theory worked it was just government regulations and interventions that messed everything up. I rolled my eyes more than a couple times when I heard they try to justify how anything that happened in the last financial crisis could be identified as rational behavior.

The reason why I rolled my eyes is that is that their answers were oh so familiar to me given what I do. You see, product managers and engineers are educated in a curriculum similar to that of economics, where emotions, irrationality, and other dare I say human behaviors are downplayed in favor of absolute rationality. In addition, traditional business and engineering curriculum tend to overstate the effectiveness of mitigating factors like documentation and training. Seeing that my role as a researcher is almost in direct contradiction to this, I often get into disagreements about how users will react to something with these people. For example, I often argue that something does indeed have some benefit but not enough for someone to adopt whatever we want them to over what they are doing today. The typical response I get from these managers and engineers is that the absolute benefit is better so people will naturally see the rational benefit and switch. I then counter with examples from research about how that is not true. Their counter is that research only covers those "people" who are not representative of the larger mass of users who will undoubtly be more like their rational idea, even though they don't actually make any effort to see if that is true. It is kind of like the "Great Silent Majority" that politicians always point to as supporting their positions even though all polling and everything says the opposite. Those people must exist because I believe they exist.

Now this isn't a rant against rational thinking. There are millions of time when I wished people behaved more rationally. I was watching this Frontline piece on the vaccine wars. To me it is mind boggling how these activist parents can claim that vaccines and autism are linked even after study after study hows they aren't. And when presented with the evidence, they say it wasn't a fair study or they come up with another thing that needs to be studied before they can declare vaccines safe. They always says look at the tens of thousands cases of autism from kids who got vaccines. But as Michael Shermer once said, suppose 1000 people spontaneously recovered from cancer without any medical explanation through prayer. That would seem miraculous but however it doesn't when you compare it to the millions of people with cancer who didn't get better even with the same or more amount of prayer. It's the larger numbers effect. 10,000 cases of autism after getting a vaccine might be crazy huge but compared to the millions of children who don't get autism when they are vaccinated, it doesn't seem so significant after all. Plus it doesn't account for other factors outside the vaccines also. This is a case where more rationality would help immensely. So like economists, product mangers, and engineers I often wish and long for a rational population. So why is this all important for someone in my field. I see it as my job to help create great experiences that satisfies people often irrational desires, wants, and goals for their rational benefit. You can see what a big problem that is.

In other news, I attended Phill's wedding a couple of weeks ago. It was a beautiful ceremony and one hell of a good time. Needless to say, it was great fun hanging out with CWP$, Vishnu, Carl, and Phill again and reliving some of our old high school glory days. It is strange to think how much time has passed since then and how, unfortunately, we will all have to grow up sometime. And that feeling got reinforced this past week because of my birthday this past week. I turned the big old 31, which is somewhat depressing since I have now left the prized 18-30 demographic. It is also the age where people start questioning why I am not married yet. So yeah, I am feeling the age right now. But one benefit of getting older is that you get to experience some new things such as becoming an uncle. Yup, my sister is going to have a baby so I will be an uncle later this year. So yeah, I vow to be that cool uncle not the creepy or uptight uncle.

I also would be remiss if I didn't mention that I also went on four dates this past month, which is like a record for me. I think that is more dates that I have had for some years or even some decades (Damn the 90's!). So yeah I am going to keep on trucking on with life until I somehow realize that I somehow arrived at that stage called maturity. But until then, peace.