Does nobody understand wishes any more?

I have an Amazon wishlist. When people want to get me a gift and are at a loss as to what to get me I direct them to my wishlist. Recently two (of two) such people have come back to me and said they didn't know what to get me from the wishlist.

This is a puzzling response. By definition everything on the list is something that I want, something that I wish for. Gift shoppers can choose something that they particularly want to give me (they want me to have it, there is some additional meaning in that gift, it is in some manner a way of expressing or extending our relationship), or ... just pick something arbitrarily that is within their budget because it is a list of stuff that I want so they can't go wrong.

Clearly I have a small, and possibly self selecting, sample here so not much can be drawn from this experience. It does however pose food for thought and potential HCI/social research. Is the shopping metaphor flawed? Is it instantiated poorly? Have I somehow tainted the interaction by how I have communicated with potential gift givers? Do people mainly select gifts on the basis of how much they like the object? Do people see something they don't like and think "I don't like this, so X won't like it" rather than "This is something X wants, therefore it is a suitable gift"? Is the focus/object/emotional response/purpose of gift giving skewed more towards the giver than we would commonly suppose?

Or more tragically are we as a society paying less attention to wishes, hopes, and dreams of others? Or does everyone just think that my wishlist is full of boring stuff?

Nozick and Distributive Justice

Today's reading is from Robert Nozick and is drawn from his Anarchy, State and Utopia.


Nozick is libertarian and in this reading he argues in favour of a non-redistribution of goods in order to benefit society. The main arguments appear to be those of entitlement (if Jones can justifiably earn vast sums of money due to his talents then he is entitled to them), and that left to their own devices people will work in order to gain that which they want and that in order to prevent inequalities the state would need to interfere with what citizens gain and how they choose to use those goods that they are allowed.

The main thrust of the argument appears to be that left unregulated inequalities will always develop, and the state should not take away that which people are entitled to simply because others are less able, less willing, or less fortunate in their accumulation of goods.

As with many issues in philosophy it seems that an absolutist stance becomes ridiculous or untenable, and we need to try to tackle them and consider them as a moderate view. Here it certainly makes sense from a practical point of view to not regulate or only lightly regulate the distribution of goods. Or, as per Rawl's original contract idea, to create social institutions and arrangements that are just from the outset.

A potential counter to Nozick's arguments is that what we gain isn't necessarily what we are entitled to. Many examples of gaining through nefarious means spring to mind, but these don't serve well as a counter to Nozick's arguments. What does appear to stand up well, or so it seems to me, is reframe the issue in terms of groups and society rather than as individuals. Goods are a social resource, and usually finite. Accumulating a high proportion, or a large influence, over these social resources diminishes the pool of available goods for others, and harms their capability to acquire a share of the remaining goods. Simply because individual transactions seem fair, in aggregate they can be unfair and result in a proportion of society that the individual is not entitled to.  Additionally, recent research [citation needed] suggests that inequalities in societies is linked to a multitude of social 'ills' such as higher crime rates, lower literacy, lower life expectancies, etc (greater religiosity too, but that is whole different matter and the direction of the effect more contentious). By accumulating an undue share of social goods, society as a whole suffers meaningfully in ways not directly attributable to the share of goods. Society could be viewed as a system, with a requirement of a redistribution of resources to keep it functioning adequately. Individuals cannot live in isolation from other humans whilst maintaining their wealth (well at least not until we have a post scarcity society, or robot underlings/overlords); that wealth is a measure of social resource that can be called upon in the form of clothes, food, housing, etc.

None of this defeats the libertarian view, but it does set a case for restricting how much should be accumulated by an individual. I'm leaning towards an ideal being allowing individual accumulation and inequalities, but for the whole to be dampened. There should not be a great gap between the least and most well off.

As a rambling aside a modern notion of entitlement comes from Locke, along the lines if you mix your labour with unclaimed stuff (e.g. land) then you are entitled to it, with appropriate caveats about not taking it all and disadvantaging others. Where this seems to be break down is with inheritance, or perhaps more accurately with the arrival of the world of more persons who would benefit from (or are disadvantaged by not having access to) a share.

The reading also covers Nozick's "taxation is slavery" argument and raises the issue of property rights, and says that those that tax us are asserting a property right in us. This is a troubling argument. Potential counters include arguing that taxation is like slavery and is on a continuum with slavery, or that there is an implied contract by being part of a state and that one can opt out of it by leaving the state. This has shades of degrees of freedom about it; leaving a state isn't a trivial matter, and there may not be any other suitable states to go to.

Property rights is also an interesting point. There are interesting articles in the literature that break property rights into different sorts, e.g. control rights, and ownership rights. Also, rights may be infringed as opposed to be violated. A right is infringed if it is not upheld, but it is reasonable not to do so (e.g. my mobile phone is mine and if I leave it on the table I expect nobody to use it, but if there is a medical emergency it is reasonable for someone to use my phone without my permission to call the emergency services).

It seems that there are also different types of ownership, or more appropriately I would term this there are different types of 'my properties'. Some things are mine like my phone, and my socks. Some things are mine like my brother or daughter. Some things are mine like my eyes and my hands. Some things are mine like my ideas and stories. Some things are mine like the custodianship of a public office, or of a social artefact. Ah, taxonomies are wonderful things. We could break down the 'my properties' (needs a suitable latin or greek term methinks) and assign different types of rights and responsibilities to them.

So there you go. A brief unedited ramble of one of the readings for the Open University's A851 Philosophy course.

March's Reading

Ooh aaaah eeee oooo ummm. Not much to report on the reading front. Still plugging away at the same non fiction. Started on Rawls' A Theory of Justice, which is a course text. I finished the Malazan Book of the Fallen, a journey (of 3.5 million words) that felt strangely less emotional than I was expecting. Definitely worth a read if you're feeling up to diving into a large and complex fantasy series.

Next up was David Weber's Out of the Dark, which was a bit.. meh. An interesting idea which didn't really develop until towards the end. This is fine itself, but I didn't find the rest of the book to be particularly noteworthy (unless if you like hearing about different models of guns that is). I picked up the book expecting the 'twist' from the start because it was given away by the description on Amazon. Bah humbug. If you want to try some Weber give his Starfire books a go.

Having a Fitt

Look at these poor tiny little buttons. What have Adobe's users done to deserve such tiny little things when there is no apparent need for them? According to Fitts's Law speed to get intercept an interaction area is a function of distance and target size. Or in other words, small buttons are difficult to get to and click, especially if they're far away. I'm not sure why, given the huge amount of available screen space here they have opted for small buttons.

February's reading...

Fiction
Dust of Dreams, book 9 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Yup, I'm slowly trawling through the series still and getting a big backlog of books waiting to be read.

Philosophy
I'm currently reading A Very Short Introduction: The Philosophy of Science. I 'do' science at work, and am generally interested in science. I like to think that I'm good at it and understand the principles, but somewhere along the way I don't think I've ever been explicitly taught the underlying philosophy and about what chaps like Popper and Kuhn have been talking about. Maybe I slipped through the cracks, maybe it just isn't generally taught any longer, maybe my university level education hasn't been sufficiently sciencey, or maybe they don't try to squeeze all that stuff into your brain until you get around to doing an MPhil.


HCI
More of a reference text this one, but I picked up a copy of Experimental Design and Analysis for Psychology that was on sale at Oxford University Press. 

Stay on target... (the task artefact cycle and remaining focussed on the task)

Two useful things to keep in mind when working in HCI (and more generally when considering systems); the task-artefact cycle, and remembering not to lose sight of the task by becoming overly focused on the current (or to be) tools.

The task-artefact cycle is one of those "obvious once it has been pointed out" things. Quite simply you have a given task, and a decision is made to change/support the task by introduce new or improved tools. Once the new tools are introduced they change the task. This is an obvious statement as it reflects the intended goal of introducing new tools. There are some subtleties involved however. The task may not have changed in the intended way, there may be secondary effects and repercussions elsewhere within a complex socio-technical system, and the task may have been radically altered. Once a new tool has been introduced a task should be re-evaluated (and it is generally useful to measure the effect of an intervention). Of course this isn't always practical and a pragmatic approach needs to be taken scaled to the importance of the task and the scale of the change. The key message here is that more than you anticipated may have changed. Some examples:

• (from Freakanomics) People give blood for free. Giving blood is a Good Thing (tm) to do, and saves lives. In a bid to encourage more giving of blood They decided to provide a modest incentive. Blood giving rates dropped, because an altruistic activity to help others had changed to an mildly unpleasant and inconvenient paid-for activity that wasn't (generally) worth the reimbursement. An interesting example of mentally framing an activity.
• (partly based on hazy memories of listening to Radio 4) In the UK in the last few years sperm donation underwent some procedural changes. Details of the donors became more available, and eventual offspring from the donation now had a 'right' to be able to find out how their paternal genetic donor was. This may have extended to being able to make contact with dear ol' gene-sire. Sperm donation rates crashed. Even before this change was implemented I was really surprised that They didn't seem to see this one coming. I can only guess that there was a bit of a user-centred design failure in that They a) failed to take donors as a human component of the system into account, b) they failed to carry out an adequate information gathering exercise, or c) one way or another they decided to just push on with it anyway (which frequently happens when there is already a Plan, and High Ups Want It To Happen (note I'm not suggested this was the case here)).
• A frequent ideal for providing user-aids is to automate part of a task to free the human up to focus on the 'high level' stuff, e.g. letting designers be creative. One potential side repercussion of this is that the more 'mundane' tasks may be an important component of assisting the person in thinking through a problem, or providing juniors with critical experience.
• Writing text with modern word processing tools can potentially be described as being radically different. It is now far easier to reuse material from drafts, to rearrange text, to collaborate on the same document, create and disseminate documents.
• Calculators and spell checkers: an exercise for the reader

A frequent problem I encounter in HCI is that people get overly focused on the tools rather than the task. The task of an employee becomes to operate software, and various stakeholders lose sight of what the employee actually needs to do. Another common problem is what I call "serving the machine" where work becomes more about process and meeting the requirements of a tool. This can become more and more bizarre as corporate identity fades or layers of other tools and procedures are put in place. Serving the machine can become more and more important, even if the original reasons why something needs to be done have been forgotten, or rendered irrelevant. In a similar vein an organisation can be ruled by unhelpful metrics, simply because that is the metric that their system gives them, and hey here are some numbers or a graph and they must be important, right? Another case is when a set of metrics are provided on a dashboard results in everything else being ignored or no longer part of the corporate ontology.

I need a "Serving/Worship the Machine" mug/tshirt/banner/whatever to wave at stakeholders when they lose sight of the underlying task (or *mumblemumble* timesheets *mumble* days in advance *mumble* all because the report is generated too early *mumble*). 

I'd like to think this topic could be extended to create a framework of tool use and task actions that will Help Save The World, but where would I find the time?

Moral Reasoning

At work I'm just finishing up a study about moral reasoning. What we've been doing is based on Kholberg's moral reasoning framework. I won't go into too much detail as better explanations of the moral reasoning framework can be found on the Internet. In short form the framework is a model of our our moral reasoning develops, moving through up to a potential of six stages split into three levels.

As wee monsters (aka the very young) we are operating at 'pre-conventional' morality, and have not yet obtained the standard level of moral reasoning. At this stage of moral reasoning we have an 'obedience and punishment' orientation, and move onto 'individualism and exchange'. An example of moral reasoning (as distinct from moral attitudes) at this stage is that of keeping promises on the basis that being known to keep promises allows future exchanges of promises. Someone reasoning at this stage would see nothing wrong with reneging on a promise if they believed that they would not be found out. Moral reasoning at the preconventional level is focused on Personal Interest.

Moving on from the pre-conventional stages most people develop to the, yes you guessed it, the 'conventional' stages. These stages appear to be tradition focused, norm-enforcing, and to a large part culturally-aspected. The value of the reasoning here then is based in part on our cultural laws, norms, and concept of being and the good. Most people end up at the conventional stage, and usually develop to stage 4 (warning hazy recollection of the numbers ahead) around age 14-21. Stage 3 reasoning is focused on positive personal relationships. Stage 4 reasoning is focused on maintaining social order. A worthwhile digression at this point; as development occurs through the stages the theory is that the previous stages are integrated into our reasoning, and are not simply rejected.

Postconventional reasoning focuses on broader and deeper issues. Stage 5 reasoning asks "What is this social order that we're maintaining? What do we want from it? What should it be? How can it serve the people?". Stage 5 reasoning could be argued to be the impetus for democracy (though again I would imagine this is culturally aspected; if citizens were universally content why question the social order?). Stage 6 reasoning focuses on universality and underlying principles. What is the good? How can we achieve it? How do we reason about these things? What principles should we adopt and why?

Postconventional reasoning is what philosophers should be aiming for, indeed what much of philosophy is about (ramble: this framework could plausibly be generalised to a reasoning framework). So far the evidence is on the side of the Philosophers; the DIT test (which is a measure of moral reasoning and Kholbergian-based) uses political scientists and philosophers as the upper anchor for the measure because of their performance on the DIT.

So... how is this topical?

The West, and to an extent the rest of the world through the UN Declaration of Human Rights, can be said to operate a theory of rights as the (or a) underlying principle of determining the good. Rights can be considered as the STOP signs for policy and justice. [Sweeping musing statement that will not be supported alert] Utilitarianism and the Kantian categorical imperative are compelling ways of viewing justice, but are incomplete of themselves and lead to undesirable outcomes if followed dogmatically. (Derek Parfit has a handy phrase, which sadly eludes me at this point, for one example of utilitarianism taken too far.) Rights help inform policy as to what should be supported, but also to prevent utilitarianist policy going to far. Rights of course can be ill-conceived just as they can be well founded.

A conflict of Rights is topical in the news at the moment. What is the most balanced view to take? What is the most right? Should we recognise all of the accorded Rights? Are some of them being 'merely' infringed as opposed to violated? A more worrying question arises; to what extent do the general public recognise that just because you don't like something doesn't mean it isn't right, that supporting the Rights of to ensure a just society involves some degree of 'pain' or 'cost'. What is right isn't the same as what is good for you. This is preconventional moral reasoning and is internally focused. What is right isn't the same as how we've always done it or things that don't offend me or things that don't inconvenience me. Hanging on to the social rules of the past for comfort or to preserve a personally beneficial status quo isn't moral (or at least isn't high up the scale of moral reasoning). Of course it should also be said that we shouldn't abandon the past simply because it is the past, or because something shiny and new has come along, or for some misplaced political correctness, or even to give in to the tyranny of the majority (hence the need for something like Rights). Ideas should be assessed neutrally. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I'd like to write (ramble) more, but I've already thrown up enough views without enough support and I'm overdue a trip to the supermarket.

This blog post was composed to the sound of Metallica being played on banjos. True story.