Oddly Influenced

It’s hard to predict how personality traits will affect behavior in new situations.We don’t have a good grasp of the difference between a “new situation” and “a variant of an old situation.”Small differences in the situation (like recent good luck) can make a big difference in how traits like “helpfulness” are expressed. So you'll probably need to try it and see ("probe-sense-response"), rather than assume you can find out enough to predict ("sense-analyze-respond").Summary sources:John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, 2005. (This is focused on questions in the philosophical idea of "virtue ethics". Unless you care about that, this is mostly a place to find primary sources.)Walter Mischel, "Toward an Integrative Science of the Person", 2004Also cited or used:Theodore Newcomb, The consistency of certain extrovert-introvert behavior patterns in 51 problem boys, 1929. (Not available online. Link is to the University of Illinois Library copy. All hail interlibrary loan!)Alice M. Isen and Paula F. Levin, "Effect of feeling good on helping: cookies and kindness", 1972. (The pay phone experiment)John M. Darley and Daniel Batson, "'From Jerusalem to Jericho': A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior", 1973 (the seminarian experiment).John M. Digman, "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model", 1999 Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment, 1968David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone, "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making", Harvard Business Review, 2007. (I used this for quotes and claims about the Cynefin framework, which is pronounced "kuh-NEV-in", as it's a Welsh word.)Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 1998Miscellaneous: “Always try to get data that’s good enough that you don’t need to do statistics on it.”What 0.14 correlation looks likeCreditsTwo-slot postage stamp vending machine image courtesy the Smithsonian Museum. Public domain.

The key message begins with the observation that categories and concepts have central examples and fuzzy boundaries. The idea that categories are usefully defined by boolean-valued necessary and sufficient conditions is outdated. The stock example is the question: "Is the pope a bachelor?" The answer is, "Well, technically", but there are clearly more central examples that capture more of the concept's connotations. (See Lakoff's 1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Gregory L. Murphy's 2004 The Big Book of Concepts is more exhaustive and covers different theories.)Examples teach you what lays within the (fuzzy) boundary. Counterexamples teach you what lays outside. You need both.Stories stimulate the kind of learning that happens from lived experience and social interaction. These claims are illustrated by the kind of examples, counterexamples, and stories that I think Etienne Wenger should have (but mostly did not) use in his 1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. The episode isn't a comprehensive – or perhaps even accurate – explanation of his theory. Because (I believe) of how the book was written, my understanding of the theory is shaky.I also drew on these writings: Wenger, Snyder, and McDermott, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, 2002Cox, Andrew M., "What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal works", 2005Etienne Wenger, "Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems: the Career of a Concept", 2010I mentioned Tinderbox, a note-taking app, and Bike, an outliner.I mentioned my habit of writing books that include mistakes that are later corrected. As advertised, the first book I wrote this way is RubyCocoa: Bringing Some Ruby Love to OS X Programming. That's a book about dead technology, and is out of print. Perhaps the best example of this style was the unfinished An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming, which is free. (The finished part is about Elm, which alas also seems dead.) Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer is an introduction to Clojure, uses something of the include-mistakes style, was pretty successful, but is old enough I've also made it free. The description of the apocryphal story of Saint Thecla is from the Apocrypals podcast. There's more than just man-eating seals.The science fiction story Año Nuevo is by Ray Naylor.----Picture of Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" via Flickr user darryl_mitchel,  under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Jean Lave discusses 'Situated Learning' and 'Legitimate Peripheral Participation.' They explore apprenticeships, storytelling in AA meetings, training methods in professions, and effective learning for newcomers in communities.

Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, 1996CreditsImage of a person using a copier via Mr. Domingo.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.XKCD, Always try to get data good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it.Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961.Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, The Russian RevolutionCreditsImage of a cow being given a physical exam ("bright or dull") courtesy Dawn Marick.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of the novels is Something Coming Through. Here's a review. "Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was" is a short story that I think stands alone. I quote from the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, but I wouldn't read it first unless you're a fan of Gene Wolfe and like figuring out the backstory yourself. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1995Paul Feyerabend, Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, 1972. CreditsWorker and Kolkhoz (collective farm) Woman Monument from C.K. Leung, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Although I don't dwell on it in this episode, Scott uses the Soviet collective farm as a big example of a failure of Seeing Like a State.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.devCreditsSatellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

MentionedOne of Glenn's talks on engineering.The first part of Hillel Wayne's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good.Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, 2010David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It", 1986. The Neal Ford talk about constraints was taken down from YouTube because Protecting Intellectual Property by removing a whole talk that uses a short clip is far more important than Mr. Ford's ideas.Glenn's other recommendations:What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, by Walter VincentiEngineering and the Mind’s Eye, by Eugene S. FergusonDefinition of the Engineering Method, by Billy Vaughn KoenA number of Henry Petroski’s books shed valuable light on the actual practice of engineering:To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful DesignInvention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to ThingDesign Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in EngineeringSuccess through Failure: The Paradox of DesignTo Forgive Design: Understanding FailureEngineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (this is quite different from the others, but by telling the real, non-idealized tale of how so many great bridges were built — including several disastrous failures and many other near failures — this book was instrumental in helping me understand how inaccurate the common stereotype of engineering really is)CreditsImage of double effect distillation chemical plant via Wikimedia Commons. User:Luigi Chiesa, CC BY 3.0. Cropped by Brian Marick.

Mark SeemannblogtwitterCode That Fits in Your Head, 2021The booksPeter Watts, Blindsight, 2006. Goodreads description. Or: free at the author's site.Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011Also mentionedRead Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, 2006Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain, 2021George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", 1956Rich Hickey, "Hammock-Driven Development" (video), 2010Peter Watts, Echopraxia, 2014Poincaré's 1904 essay on creativity is described (with extensive quotes) in this article. The original source for the essay is his book The Foundations of Science, starting on page 179, a chapter titled "Mathematical Creation". The book is freely available for Kindle and in other formats via the Wayback Machine.Jamis Buck, Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages, 2015Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software, 1996. Free at the author's site.CreditsThe image of Theseus, the spaceship in Blindsight, is from a page from Peter Watts' website. The image is not marked Creative Commons, though the whole novel is, so I'm hoping Mr. Watts won't mind.

DDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, 2021Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows'Aimi Hussein and Racheal Bryant, "The secret life of cows: Social behavior in dairy herds" (PDF)Ian Welsh, "The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred"Paul Feyerabend and Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001John T. Jost, A Theory of System Justification, 2004. Which I have not read, but I have listened to a podcast conversation with him.James Suzman, "Why 'Bushman banter was crucial to hunter-gatherer's evolutionary success", derived from his book Affluence Without Abundance, 2017Peter Freuchen, Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimos, 1961 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975CreditsImage of a veterinarian succussing a Holstein cow courtesy Dawn Marick, DVM, MS, DACVIM(LA).