Archive of posts with tag 'Psychology'

L’appétit Vient en Mangeant →

July 24, 2023 • #

There’s a French expression I like:

L’appétit vient en mangeant

Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.

Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise, or even go outside.

Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come. Paradoxically, the most reliable way to create motivation is to start doing the thing.

So great. The ultimate paradox of human productivity. For some reason when we’ve done nothing is when we’re the most overwhelmed with a task, a project, a hobby, a habit. Once we start doing things, those things get easier. They become more enjoyable. The tangible movement and progress motivates us for more. Another excellent example of the benefits of keeping things simple — of getting to basics before you overthink your work.

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The Low-Code IKEA Effect

March 22, 2021 • #

I linked a few days ago to Packy McCormick’s piece Excel Never Dies, which went deep on Microsoft Excel, the springboard for a thousand internet businesses over the last 30 years. “Low-code” techniques in software have become ubiquitous at this point, and Excel was the proto-low-code environment — one of the first that stepped toward empowering regular people to create their own software. In the mid-80s, if you wanted to make your own software tools, you were in C, BASIC, or Pascal. Excel and its siblings (Lotus 1-2-3, VisiCalc) gave users a visual workspace, an abstraction layer lending power without the need to learn languages.

Today in the low-code ecosystem you have hundreds of products for all sorts of use cases leaning on similar building principles — Bubble and Webflow for websites, Make.com and Zapier for integrations, Notion and Coda for team collaboration, even Figma for designs. The strategy goes hand-in-hand with product-led growth: start with simple use cases, be inviting to new users, and gradually empower them to build their own products.

Excel has benefited from this model since the 80s: give people some building blocks, a canvas, and some guardrails and let them go build. Start out with simple formulas, create multiple sheets, cross-link data, and eventually learn enough to build your own complete custom programs.

What is it about low-code that makes such effective software businesses? Sure, there’s the flexibility it affords to unforeseen use cases, and the adaptability to apply a tool to a thousand different jobs. But there’s psychology at play here that makes it particularly compelling for many types of software.

There’s a cognitive phenomenon called the “IKEA effect”, which says:

Consumers are likely to place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created

IKEA is famous for its modular furniture, which customers take home and partially assemble themselves. In a 2011 paper, Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely identified this effect, studying how consumers valued products that they personally took part in creating, from IKEA furniture, to origami figures, to LEGO sets. Other studies of effort justification go way back to the 1950s, so it’s a principle that’s been understood, even if only implicitly, by product creators for decades.

Low-code tools harness this effect, too. Customers are very willing to participate in the creation process if they get something in return. In the case of IKEA it’s more portable, affordable furniture products. In low-code software it’s a solution tailored to their personal, specific business need. Paradoxically, the additional effort a customer puts into a product through self-service, assembly, or customization generates a greater perception of value than consumer being handed an assembled, completed product.

SaaS companies should embrace this idea. Letting the customer take over for the “last mile” creates wins all around for everyone. Mutual benefits accrue to both creator and consumer:

Customers have a sense of ownership when they play a role in building their own solution.
The result can be personalized. In business environments, companies want to differentiate themselves from competitors. They don’t want commodities that any other player can simply buy and install. Certainly not for their unique business practices.
Production costs are reduced. The product creator builds the toolbox (or parts list, instructions, and tool kit) and lets the consumer take it from there. Don’t have to spend time understanding the nuances of hundreds of different use cases. You provide building blocks and let recombination generate thousands of unique solutions.
Increased retention! Studies showed that consumers consistently rated products they helped assemble higher in value than already-assembled ones. This valuation bias manifests in retention dynamics for your product: if customers are committed enough and build their own solution, they’ll more likely imbue it with greater value.

The challenge for product creators is to strike a balance — a “just-right” level of customer participation. Too much abstraction in your product, requiring too much building of primitives, and the customer is confused and unlikely to have the patience to work through it. Likewise, when you buy an IKEA table, you don’t want to be sanding, painting, or drilling, but snapping, locking, and bolting are fine. Success is a key criteria to get the positive upside. From the Wikipedia page:

To be sure, “labor leads to love only when labor results in successful completion of tasks; when participants built and then destroyed their creations, or failed to complete them, the IKEA effect dissipated.” The researchers also concluded “that labor increases valuation for both ‘do-it-yourselfers’ and novices.”

Participation in the process creates a feedback loop: the tool adapts to the unique circumstances of the consumer, functions as a built-in reward, and the consumer learns more about their workflow in the process.

Low-code as a software strategy allows for a personalization on-ramp. Its IKEA effect gives customers the power to participate in building their own solution, tailoring it to their specific tastes along the way.

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The Heaving Sea of Twitter →

July 16, 2020 • #

Great piece from Tanner Greer on the evolution of online discourse from the early days of the internet to today’s firestorm of Twitter.

First, a fond look back on the early days of online conversation — the days of the blog, the forum, the pseudonymous publisher, the rule of the idea and its impassioned, argued defense:

There were two aspects of this older internet ecology that set it apart from the current get up. The first was its clear division into hundreds of separate communities. This was most explicit in the forums, which usually did not allow users to comment unless they created a log-in and agreed to very specific community rules. But this was true even of the blogs that anyone could view or comment. No blog was island—or if an island, each was part of an archipelago, a constellation of commentators interested in a specific topic or problem. Perhaps you cared a great deal about the Iraq War, or peak oil, or New Atheism. You would find people blogging about it, read their posts, write your own posts in response to what they were typing, and try to leave incisive comments in the threads attached to posts you liked.

On the devolution of this discourse with the expansion of Twitter, and its absorption of much of the older communities of conversation:

But if writers were to have people read their blogs, then their blogs had to be good. This was the price of participation. On Twitter, anybody who can think up a snarky 140 characters retort can contribute to the “conversation.”

And finally, a couple of choice descriptions of Twitter in 2020:

Twitter is an undifferentiated mass of writhing souls trying to inflict their angry opinions on the earth

The users of Twitter are one great mass. The ponds and lakes of the blogosphere have emptied into a heaving sea. In this sea, Twitter users are linked together, but linked weakly. They are unmoderated, unorganized, atomized—but stuck all together.

Twitter can be a great place, but it takes conscious effort and maintenance to make it so. The resurgence of independent publishing, newsletters, and podcasts makes me optimistic that sane communities of interesting conversation can break free of the mega-platform, shallow oceans of noise. Lets revive the exciting days of the internet in 2005, but maybe with fewer forum flame wars. Perhaps the 2020 version of blog comment thread toxicity can stay behind on Twitter.

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Three Languages

April 7, 2020 • #

The economist Arnold Kling is a regular on EconTalk.

This interview discussion revisits his 2013 book, The Three Languages of Politics in light of the current political landscape.

In the current media landscape, amplified by the massive expansion of networks and social media, everyone is talking past one another. Not even speaking the same language.

To quote Kling from the interview:

People are not trying to change the minds of the other side, or trying to open the minds of their own side. They’re trying to close the minds of their own side.

I think this motivation to close minds and not seek common ground comes from a lack of fluency in these languages — we don’t understand one another, so its simpler to attempt to damn it, vilify it, and retreat further into your own rhetoric.

As he defines them, the languages are progressive, conservative, and libertarian.

Broadly, the “three languages” try to give a framework around what creates such wide differences in perspective from person to person — what generates the tribalistic “me vs. them” attitudes between folks with differing worldviews. You tend to talk past others if you don’t recognize your own preferred language, and explicitly make an effort to empathize with the other’s perspective. It’s not the specific naming of the categories that’s important, it’s how each filters and prioritizes views along a preferred morality continuum (“political psychology” as Kling refers to it):

Progressive — oppressed vs. oppressor
Conservative — civilization vs. barbarism
Libertarian — liberty vs. coercion

Naturally no person exclusively and cleanly speaks in a single language, but these are guidelines to help position where you’re coming from in relation to another.

Listening to Kling’s concepts, I was reminded of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and his framing of moral foundations theory.

I recently linked to an interview Kling did with author Martin Gurri, the author of the excellent book The Revolt of the Public, which I’m currently enjoying. That book touches on a lot of the same territory as this discussion.

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Signaling as a Service →

March 30, 2020 • #

Great post from Julian Lehr analyzing aspects of signaling and how it applies to consumption, education, and charity.

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100 Little Ideas →

February 21, 2020 • #

Ideas, quips, and heuristics from Morgan Housel.

Base-Rate Neglect: Assuming the success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try doesn’t apply to you, caused by overestimating the extent to which you do things differently than everyone else.

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Daniel Kahneman on AI Podcast

January 21, 2020 • #

I don’t know what Lex Fridman is doing to recruit the guests he gets on his show (The Artificial Intelligence Podcast), but it’s one of the best technical podcasts out there.

This one is a good introduction to the work of legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman (of Thinking, Fast and Slow fame).

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Rory Sutherland on Alchemy →

November 12, 2019 • #

This is a great conversation from EconTalk with advertising exec Rory Sutherland on his new book Alchemy. He’s got interesting ideas on the role of psychology and human emotion when it comes to decision making, markets, choice, and governance. A very entertaining and humorous discussion, as well.

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Venkatesh Rao on Waldenponding →

November 4, 2019 • #

“Waldenponding” is a phrase coined by Rao to describe the growing backlash movement against hyperconnectedness, driving people to disconnect completely and long for a life of lower information overload and deeper meaning — a reincarnation of Thoreau’s idea from Walden. This podcast interview is about an essay Rao wrote last year that argues against this idea, a contrarian viewpoint considering the “right” or “intelligent” thing to do is considered to be disconnecting from the vapid, toxic environments of Twitter and Facebook. He makes a compelling case about a continuum of information-light vs. information-dense sources of data, and high and low latency, arguing for the merits of connectedness and low latency social media sources — the “Global Social Computer in the Cloud” as he says. On one end you have low latency/shallowness (tweets) and the other high latency/richness (1000 page history books).

I love this idea. Anyone making arguments for diverse spectra of material and owning your own attention has my interest. In the essay he describes the view of the waldenponder as someone convinced that the Googles and Facebooks of the world have attention-hacked our brains and that their platforms are poison, an argument he refutes by saying that that’s “giving the attention hackers too much credit”. I would agree — people have more agency than they admit. After all, it’s easier to blame your inability to put down your phone or close Instagram on an algorithm than your own decision making.

Great interview and fantastic, thought-provoking essay.

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What's Your Delta? →

October 13, 2019 • #

On comparing yourself to others:

We all have a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. You have one. I have one. And this story is what we use to judge our successes and our failures. But it’s not the only story that could have been written, it’s just the one that was written. If your story has more blessings than hardships, consider lending a hand to someone who wasn’t as fortunate. The power of having a positive delta is being able to uplift those currently experiencing a negative delta.

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David Deppner on Leadership, Confidence, and Humility →

September 3, 2019 • #

I thought this was a fantastic interview on EconTalk. David Deppner is a listener of the podcast that sent Russ a thought-provoking email question on the subject of leadership and what traits make for “good” qualities in a leader — whether a CEO, presidential candidate, or parent.

Anyone in a form of leadership role like this (which likely includes everyone in some context) struggles with this question. Do those you lead that look to you for guidance really want the truth? The truth is that no leader really has it all figured out. There’s a boatload of uncertainty everywhere. But certain people when looking to a CEO or politician for “leadership” aren’t really asking for raw honesty; they often want confidence and vision. This explains the phenomena of the politician making claims they can’t uphold, or the CEO that has pie-in-the-sky ideas about what their company will become, or the parent that tells white lies to their kids to protect them from a perhaps-complex reality.

All around a fascinating conversation. Props to Russ Roberts for always having interesting conversations no matter where the ideas come from.

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Weekend Reading: Intellectual Humility, Scoping, and Gboard

August 31, 2019 • #

🛤 Missing the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Honest postmortems are insightful to get the inside backstory on what happened behind the scenes with a company. In this one, Jason Crawford goes into what went wrong with Fieldbook before they shut it down and were acquired by Flexport a couple years ago:

Now, with a year to digest, I think this is true and was a core mistake. I vastly underestimated the resources it was going to take—in time, effort and money—to build a launchable product in the space.

In the 8 years since we launched the first version of Fulcrum, we’ve had (fortunately) smaller versions of this experience over and over. Each new major overhaul, large feature, or product business model change we’ve undertaken has probably cost us twice the time we initially expected it to. Scoping is a science itself that everyone has to learn.

In Jeff Bezos’s 2018 letter to Amazon shareholders, he discusses the topic of high standards: how to have them and how to get your team to have them. (As a side note, if you don’t read Bezos’s shareholder letters, you’re missing out. Even if you’ve already read all the business and startup advice in the world, you will find new and keen insights there.)

Bezos makes a few interesting points, but I’ll focus on one: To have high standards in practice, you need realistic expectations about the scope of effort required.

As a simple example, he mentions learning to do a handstand. Some people think they should be able to learn a handstand in two weeks; in reality, it takes six months. If you go in thinking it will take two weeks, not only do you not learn it in two weeks, you also don’t learn it in six months—you learn it never, because you get discouraged and quit. Bezos says a similar thing applies to the famous six-page memos that substitute for slide decks at Amazon (the ones that are read silently in meetings). Some people expect they can write a good memo the night before the meeting; in reality, you have to start a week before, in order to allow time for drafting, feedback, and editing.

🏛 Ten Ways to Defuse Political Arrogance

David Blankenhorn calls for a return of intellectual humility in public discourse.

At the personal level, intellectual humility counterbalances narcissism, self-centeredness, pridefulness, and the need to dominate others. Conversely, intellectual humility seems to correlate positively with empathy, responsiveness to reasons, the ability to acknowledge what one owes (including intellectually) to others, and the moral capacity for equal regard of others. Arguably its ultimate fruit is a more accurate understanding of oneself and one’s capacities. Intellectual humility also appears frequently to correlate positively with successful leadership (due especially to the link between intellectual humility and trustworthiness) and with rightly earned self-confidence.

⌨️ The Machine Intelligence Behind Gboard

A fun technical overview of how the Google team is using predictive machine learning models to make typing on mobile devices more efficient.

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Caution on Bias Arguments →

July 18, 2019 • #

Ever since reading Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, and Slow, biases are always in the front of mind when considering approaches to problems.

Scott Alexander has some interesting thoughts on this topic, namely that bias is ever present regardless of the environment, worthy of vigilance:

This is a general phenomenon: for any issue, you can think of biases that could land people on one side or the other. People might be biased toward supporting moon colonization because of decades of sci-fi movies pushing space colonization as the wave of the future, or because Americans remember the moon landing as a great patriotic victory, or because big defense companies like Boeing will lobby for a project that would win them new contracts. Or people might be biased against moon colonization because of hidebound Luddite-ism, or an innate hominid preference for lush green forests and grasslands, or a pessimistic near-termism that rejects with payoffs more than a few years out. I personally might be biased towards moon colonization because I’ve been infected with the general Silicon Valley technophile mindset; or I personally might be biased against it because I’m a Democrat and Trump’s been the loudest modern proponent of more moon missions.

If we’re all biased in some way all the time, where do we go from here? Do we bother having conversations anymore after person A in an argument says to B “you’re biased because of X”? What’s the proper response? How can a debate be had if bias disqualifies you from forming an argument?

Kahneman argues for attempting to take the “outside view” on a topic to give yourself perspective. Getting outside of your own head is important, as humans have an innate tendency to heavily rely on intuitions (for evolutionary reasons, in my view) since they can speed up response time¹. This becomes a problem when issues are larger and more abstract than our ancestors would’ve ever encountered.

Ultimately it seems a sound approach to me to simply consider your potential biases as you’re forming a set of ideas or a particular point of view before making arguments to those with opposing viewpoints. Succinctly put here:

Most important, I think first-person bias arguments are valuable. You should always be attentive to your own biases. First, because it’s easier for you; a rando on Twitter may not know how my whiteness or my Jewishness affects my thought processes, but I might have some idea. Second, because you’re more likely to be honest: you’re less likely to invent random biases to accuse yourself of, and more likely to focus on things that really worry you. Third, you have an option besides just shrugging or counterarguing. You can approach your potential biases in a spirit of curiosity and try to explore them. I think I’m probably biased against communism because many communists I met have been nasty people who tried to hurt me, so I try to solve that by reading more communist books and seeking out good communist arguments wherever I can find them. Second- and third-person bias arguments risk feeling some kind of awkward option to change your opinions to something you don’t really believe in order to deflect someone’s bias accusations. First-person bias arguments should lead to a gradual process of trying to look for more information to counter whatever motivated reasoning you might have.

Slate Star Codex presents refreshing viewpoints on topics like this — essentially Alexander thinking out loud about all sides of an issue that all rational people consider inside their own heads, even if they can’t or won’t articulate it.

Recall Kahneman’s “system 1 and system 2” modes of thinking — with the former being oriented around rapid involuntary intuitive response, and the latter high demand decisions based on complex information and directed thought. Humans of 50,000 years ago needed a reliable system 1 a lot more than system 2. Evolutionarily speaking, it was more important to be able to quickly assess whether your tribe was under threat of attack than it was to think deeply about abstract mathematics. ↩

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Jonathan Haidt on the Righteous Mind →

July 9, 2019 • #

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was one of my favorite recent nonfiction books I’ve read in the last few years. It’s one of the most objective, deep analyses of a question that’s interested me for years: why do people have such fundamental and deep disagreements on how the world works or should work? Why are political left and right seemingly so far apart from one another on such fundamental levels? Haidt’s perspective as an expert in moral psychology provides insights into the foundations of how we’re different and how we’re the same.

Haidt argues that reason often serves our emotions rather than the mind being in charge. We can be less interested in the truth and more interested in finding facts and stories that fit preconceived narratives and ideology. We are genetically predisposed to work with each other rather than being purely self-interested and our genes influence our morality and ideology as well. Haidt tries to understand why people come to different visions of morality and politics and how we might understand each other despite those differences.

This is an EconTalk interview with Haidt on the book from 2014. It’s a good primer on the ideas and hopefully whets the appetite to read — a highly recommended book, for sure.

I love EconTalk’s show notes. Each episode contains an additional many hours worth of interesting reading material, links, books, and more. Great stuff.

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Intuition, Expertise, and Learning

March 13, 2019 • #

The legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow in his wheelhouse, talking about human biases, decision making, and signal vs. noise.

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The High Road →

November 27, 2018 • #

A great reminder for those of us that can get spun up and anxious about the unimportant, from Shane Parrish:

When people are rude, our subconscious interprets it as an assault on hierarchy instincts. Our evolutionary programming responds with thoughts like, “Who are you to tell me something so rude? I’ll show you….”

Our instincts are to escalate when really, we should be focused on de-escalating the situation. One way to do that is to take the high road.

Say something along the lines of “I can see that.” You don’t have to apologize. You don’t have to agree with what the other person is saying. But I promise the results are magic. It’s hard to be angry with someone who agrees with you. And when there is no one to argue with and they’re the only person worked up about the situation, they will quickly feel uncomfortable and try to correct course.

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