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Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.
Corante Blogs
Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.
Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media
There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience
Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many
Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor
Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."
From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game
Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience
Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
Corante Developments
Here you will find the latest news from Corante including updates on upcoming events, new initiatives, product and publication launches, and more.
It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.
I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.
He was also, it should be said, a kind and thoughtful soul and it was the rare conversation in which he didn't ask, with sincerity, about what he knew of my life, e.g. our new babe, and we didn't talk as seemingly old friends about our lives and respective paths. I can't say I knew him very well, of course, but in our half-dozen get-togethers over the years and dozens of conversations I got a good sense of the man: he cared about learning and sharing and his bearing was earnest and ego-less and we'll miss him for that and more.
We wanted to let you know about a discount to New Comm Forum, the annual event event put on by our friends at the Society for New Communications Research. The conference, which runs from April 22-25, will feature many of the field's leading observers and is an important event for those looking, in the words of SNCR, to "better understand new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society."
Check out the event's website and, if you're interested in attending, be sure to use the code supplied below for a special discount.
EARLY BIRD PRICING - NOW UNTIL FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $995.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $195.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
REGULAR PRICING - AFTER FEB. 15th
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Pre-conference or post-conference session - $249.
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We've been remiss in letting you know about two new independent blogs we've helped launch in the past month or so.
The first - the ConversationHub - is a companion blog to Supernova 2007, the latest edition of Kevin Werbach's excellent conference on all things connected. As the conference site says: "Supernova examines the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy. As disparate physical and social networks link with one another, a new societal network is rapidly evolving... The New Network is greater than the sum of its parts. It challenges us to re-create everything from the software and hardware we use...to the business models we employ...to the information and entertainment we encounter...to the ways we work and play."
Visit the ConversationHub and you'll find several dozen leading thinkers and doers, led by a few notable ringleaders, weighing in on the themes and trends of the day in technology and business. We encourage you to tune in - feel free to comment and even suggest topics and ideas for posts.
The second blog - Mobile Messaging 2.0 - convenes about a dozen top observers of the mobile messaging space for an intense discussion of the industry and where it's headed. Among its contributors are leading commentators, journalists and players in the field - tune in and you'll find them touching on topics such as mobile device design, messaging platforms, market pressures, user-generated content, interface design, and much, much more.
Also, if you visit the site, which is sponsored by Airwide Solutions, this week, you'll find live coverage and commentary from Global Messaging 2007, to which several of our contributors have traveled to hear about the latest developments from a broad spectrum of the industry's players and providers.
Be sure to catch the Office 2.0 Conference and hear from and engage with leading thinkers and doers in this exciting new market. Find out more here and be sure to use the code "GLDRK" for a special discount for Corante readers.
Don't Miss The DrugSafetyHub, a new blog on counterfeit drugs and the evolution of the pharma industry
Evolutionary psychologists argue that we can understand the workings of the human mind by investigating how it evolved. Much of their research focuses on the past two million years of hominid evolution, during which our ancestors lived in small bands, eating meat they either scavenged or hunted as well as tubers and other plants they gathered. Living for so long in this arrangement, certain ways of thinking may have been favored by natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists believe that a lot of puzzling features of the human mind make sense if we keep our heritage in mind.
The classic example of these puzzles is known as the Wason Selection Task. People tend to do well on this task if it is presented in one way, and terribly if it is presented another way. You can try it out for yourself.
Version 1:
You are given four cards. Each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other. Indicate only the card or cards you need to turn over to see whether any of these cards violate the following rule: if a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other side.
Now you're a bouncer at a bar. You must enforce the rule that if a person is drinking beer, then he must be over 21 years old. The four cards below each represent one customer in your bar. One side shows what the person is drinking, and the other side shows the drinker's age. Pick only the cards you definitely need to turn over to see if any of these people are breaking the law and need to be thrown out.
The answer to version one is D and 5. The answer to version two is beer and 17.
If you took these tests, chances are you bombed on version one and got version two right. Studies consistently show that in tests of the first sort, about 25% of people choose the right answer. But 65% of people get test number two right.
This is actually a very weird result. Both tests involve precisely the same logic: If P, then Q. Yet putting this statement in terms of social rules makes it far easier for people to solve than if it is purely descriptive.
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby of the University of California at Santa Barbara have argued that the difference reveals some of our evolutionary history. Small bands of hominids could only hold together if their members obeyed social rules. If people started cheating on one another--taking other people's gifts of food, for example, without giving gifts of their own--the band might well fall apart. Under these conditions, natural selection produced a cheating detection system in the brain. On the other hand, our hominid ancestors did not live or die based on their performance on abstract logic tests. Rather than being a general-purpose problem-solver, the human brain became adapted to solving the problems that our ancestors regularly faced in life.
The Wason Selection Task has become the center of the debate over evolutionary psychology. Some critics, such as the French psychologist Dan Sperber, claim that Cosmides and Tooby can't make such strong statements about human reasoning from the Wason Selection Task. Others claim that the brain can't be sliced up into modules so nicely.
The controversy has taken a very interesting turn now, thanks to brain imaging. A team of Italian psychologists had people lie in an MRI scanner and work their way through a set of puzzles that followed the same line of logic as the ones I presented above. They then compared how the brain responded to the challenges to see if indeed the brain works differently when it is solving problems in terms of social exchange than when the problem is more abstract.
The psychologists didn't use a conventional Wason Selection Task like the ones above, because they wanted to make the problems as similar as possible, except that one dealt with social exchanges. Brain imaging requires this sort of strict experimental design, because it's very easy to see differences in brain activity that aren't actually relevant to the question a scientist wants to answer. For example, if one puzzle just so happens to involve picturing an object, some of the brain's visual processing may become active. So the researchers told their subjects that the puzzles would involve a hypothetical tribe. A purely descriptive puzzle might require subjects to consider the rule, "If a person cracks walnut shells, then he drinks pond water." The subjects might then see a set of cards that read, "He didn't drink pond water," "He didn't crack walnut shells," He cracked walnut shells," and "He drank pond water." The researchers also had their subjects solve puzzles that involved social exchanges. The rule in these cases might be, "If you give me sunflower-seeds, then I give you poppy petals."
The psychologists report the results of the test in a paper in press at the journal Human Brain Mapping (click the html link to get the whole paper for free). The results are fascinating--although the researchers don't claim to have settled the debate over the cheater module. Both the social exchange and descriptive version of the puzzle activated the same network of regions on the left side of the brain. One region (the angular gyrus) is considered important for semantic tasks. A second region is located near the left temple (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). It's essential for considering many different pieces of information at once. The third region, the medial prefrontal cortex, becomes active when people need to bear in mind a larger goal while they solve the many small problems it poses. Previous studies have shown that the left side of the brain plays a much more important role than the right in reasoning and coming up with explanations for how the world works in general.
Now here's the kicker: the social exchange version of the problem doesn't just activate this left-brain network. It also activates the same regions in the right side of the brain. Many studies in which people have thought about social situations have tended to turn on the right side of the brain more than the left, and so in one sense this result isn't too surprising. But it is surprising when you consider that the descriptive version of the puzzle that only switch on parts of the left side of the brain involved thinking about other people and their actions. You might think that that would be social enough to engage any parts of the brain specializing in social thinking. Apparently not. Only when the puzzle involved rules for social exchanges did the right-brain network come on line.
Is this the cheater module? It's conceivable that the Italian psychologists tapped into some social brain circuit that isn't specifically adapted for enforcing social rules, but for some somewhat broader group of social problems. It would be interesting if a test other than the Wason Selection Task could trigger the same left versus left-right patterns. The precise evolutionary forces that shaped this feature of the mind may not be clear yet. But this experiment is an important step towards working out the biology between the strange results of the Wason test. Clearly, our brains throw a lot more neurons at logic problems when they concern our social lives instead of abstractions. Analytic philosophers are made, you could say, but political philosophers are born.
Update: 7:15 pm-- I decided to change the first version of the test to avoid ambiguity.
Update: Tuesday, 8:15 am-- Some commenters have argued that people do better with the bar version of the puzzle because people have more experience with it than with abstract logic. Actually, many variations of the puzzle have been tested out, and the same results emerge. Notice, for example, that the Italian scientists who did the most recent study put the puzzles in terms of a hypothetical tribe, with which the subjects had no experience at all. Despite this different format, almost precisely the same fraction of the subjects got the different versions write as in more familiar versions of the test, such as the bartending example.
Thanks also to the sharp readers who pointed out that the puzzles need to be If-Then propositions.
This may not be true of Wason tests in general, but in the example test shown above, I'd argue the two questions are not logically equivalent.
I got the first wrong and the second right, as expected. But I got the first question wrong because I picked up on "and you have to make sure that student files for a class have been properly labeled" and inferred that for a student marking system the grade-number correlations must be exclusive - so for the files to be "properly labelled" only the D grade should have a 3 and a 3 should only be applied to a D grade - so you'd have to check all 4 files.
Now the final question doesn't support this inference, saying just "Pick only the card or cards that you have to turn over to see if any of the files violates the rule." But I'd argue this is in direct conflict with the first statement explaining the task.
So I don't know how much the given example demonstrates the supposed evolutionary difference - I think the two problems are not specified identically apart from the social context in one.
2. Brent M Krupp on May 2, 2005 07:23 PM writes...
I completely agree with Horse. That first question is horribly specified without any guidance on what we can assume or not (and if we're to assume nothing, well, I don't want to assume that). The second question involves concrete real-world details of ages and drinking so we know exactly what we can assume about the situation.
I'm hoping this is just a poorly explicated Wason Test and not that the Wason Test is crap. =)
Perhaps it's because of finals week that I can't figure out how you got the answer for the first one. Does not having a "5" on one side automatically mean it doesn't follow the rule, so you wouldn't need to turn it over? How is it not "D" (where 3 could or could not be on the other side) and "3" (where D could or could not be on the other side)? 5 outright breaks the rule, does it not?
"a card with a D on one side has a 3 on the other side."
When I did it I did assume that we were supposed to make sure cards with a 3 had as well, i.e. looking for a 3-D card. Rereading the rule after I read the solution I see that I misinterpreted the instructions by making an unwarrented assumption. (You know about assumptions: they make a you know what of you and me.)
With the social example, there is nothing to interpret. I know the rules: an underaged person may not legally have ethanol but can have soda. Anyone twenty-one years or older can legally have the booze but does not have to.
I think it is really clear that this is not a logic problem per se since the actually logic is trivially obvious. It is a communication problem. It is easier to to communicate a problem when people already know the rules. This should not be surprising at all. And this leads to a prediction. If you in subtle manner reworded the second problem so that the adult had to have a beer, people who get the problem wrong in droves.
9. Jonathan Vause on May 3, 2005 04:53 AM writes...
I agree with Mike, the Wason test seems completely meaningless. People solve the second version of the test from memory, and get the first one wrong because actually they have to think, abstractly, about it - tricky - and don't absorb all the information before they answer. The real puzzle is why evolutionary psychologists get so excited about it.
10. Robert Karls Stonjek on May 3, 2005 07:20 AM writes...
There is an error in the form of the first question.
The logic being checked is a simple "If p then q", but Carl has omitted the IF from the first question.
The CORRECT answer to the first question is "All four".
If the question is asked as Michael Gazzaniga does in "The Mind's Past" P.168:
"Determine whether the following rule has any exceptions. If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other side.” He also stipulates that all cards have a number on one side and a letter on the other side.
Here is the logic: you only need to check the IF part of the statement ie only if there is an ‘F’ on the letter side of the card do you have to check to see if there is three on the other. The ‘letter’ side of the card may be obscured. A ‘3’ may be coupled with any letter.
IF you omit to stipulate that all cards have a letter on one side and a number on the other, then any of the four cards may have an ‘F’ on one side, but you don’t need to check the ‘3’ card if the ‘IF’ stipulation is made (ie you must check three of the cards).
If you omit the ‘IF’ part of the statement then one must check both the ‘3’ and the ‘F’ to make sure they are coupled correctly with the complimentary ‘F’ or ‘3’ and the other cards to make sure that they are not erroneously coupled with the ‘3’ or ‘F’ ie you must check all four cards.
Carl omitted the ‘IF’ so all four cards must be checked. Unfortunately, Carl has been caught in his own net and has shown that he had not properly understood the underlying logic, therefore the error.
But this is not a too terrible reflection on Carl as Cosmides and Tooby made a similar error – they omitted the explicit stipulation that all cards must have a number on one side and a letter on the other, so the correct answer to the original question as asked (by them) “all but the ‘3’ card”. See their book ‘The Adapted Mind”, Page 182. The roundabout way that the question is asked does not explicitly state that a number must appear on one side and a letter on the other, so F may appear on the other side of the card showing ‘D’.
In general, it is important to ask these questions correctly – there just might be someone with greater insight and intellect than yourself watching. An error in the question will result in a correct answer to the erroneous question but not to the classic problem – highly encephalated individuals don’t like their moderately equipped colleagues pointing the finger at their expense!
11. Chris Ackerman on May 3, 2005 12:23 PM writes...
Normally I'm a fan of this blog, but Evo Psych and fMRI make for serious danger areas for bad science.
The Wason card test results might be compelling if they were found in people who were raised in isolation, ie, people who would have had as little practical experience with social exchange as most of us would with arbitrary logic puzzles. Then any differences would be attributable to genetically specified brain wiring. The happy rareness of such individuals means the tests must be conducted with normal people, who have had to solve reciprocal social exchange problems numerous times per day, every day of their lives. What's more, these problems will vary widely in their specifics, so a generalized representation will be easy to form, so as to map quickly to new problems. Nor is it required that this social exchange knowledge is represented in the mind in logical form, as the nativists seem to assume. Research studies (and informal observation) show that untrained people are quite bad at logic, so perhaps the knowledge is more naturally represented as learned associative pairings (I give-I don't get-danger!) where the activation of one part activates the others, drawing attention to the potential conflict.
The brain study adds nothing to all this nothingness; if there are differences in cognitive performance as displayed in the behavioral tests, how else might this be manifested but in differences in activity in some brain areas? And if you hold everything constant but the social exchange aspect, where else but in areas of the brain already known to be involved in representing social interactions would you expect to find this differentiated activity?
BTW, I got both problems right; maybe that's because I have the logic puzzle-solving gene, or maybe it's because I've seen these types of puzzles before.
This is a classic case of logic - that is: A -> B does not imply B -> A. I knew that, and still bombed on the first test. Had I given it thought, I'm sure I could've solved it correctly, but the whole idea is to trick you into thinking you know it.
I did fine on the second test, and I believe that, yes indeed, the reason people perform the way they do on the two tests is because we bring a scripted form of reasoning to the second one based on real world experience. In a way, it follows what Roger Schank has proposed in his book Dynamic Memory. He claims that we mostly solve problems through being reminded of previous similar circumstances, as opposed to truly working out all the gory details from first principles everytime. And when we encounter new situations, we remeber the exceptions of those new situations as compared to what we were most reminded of. Truly, we get through the day by applying our past experiences, rather than thinking too hard.
14. Lawrie Hunter on May 5, 2005 09:47 AM writes...
Hold on a second here: In version 1, ALL the cards need to be investigated: i.e. if the F card has a 3 on the back, it violates the rule. If the 5 card has a D on the back, it violates the rule.
Close, Lawrie, but not quite "write". You need to leave F out of that since the first assumption is not asked to be questioned. There IS a letter on one side and not the other.
D'oh! Answer was correct as given. For the 3,it doesn't matter what's on the other side. Any letter will fit the rules, as you all probably already knew.
In order to properly explain the premise of Test-1, you have to spend a fair amount of time explaining the assumptions. Even someone comfortable with logic and "letter" -> "number" notation has to read the problem and think about it. The symbols just don't differentiate themselves.
In Test-2, the real-world context bypasses all the need to explain the assumptions and the symbols. With no thought whatsoever, the symbols "drinks" and "ages" are easily differentiated.
Test-2 has the benefit of capitalizing on a pre-existing understanding that makes it easy to instantly absorb the task at hand. Test-1 does not. When the rules of the game map directly to preexisting experience, no time is needed to explain them.
It's not obvious to me that that's evolution speaking.
1) Anyone with a grounding in logic would recognize that "if D, then 3" is logically equivalent to "if not 3, then not D". This immediately suggests that you turn over all letter cards with a D on them as well as all number cards without a 3 on them.
2) As pointed out by Bryan, many people think that if A implies B, then B implies A. (They may also confuse "if" with "only if", "implies" with "implied by", and "necessary condition" with "sufficient condition".) I had to disabuse a graduate student in physics of this misconception not long ago; I had expected better of someone holding a physics degree.
3) I, too, must agree with Mike Hopkins. Version 2 of the test concords with common practice in the US, and I suspect that at least some of those who answer this question correctly are merely falling back on their own experience. If the rule for version 2 was modified somewhat so that it deviated from common experience—say, "if a person is drinking soda, then he or she must be under 21 years of age"—I suspect that a smaller percentage would get it right (see previous point).
4) Rather than just having the respondents give their answers, wouldn't it be more instructive to ask them to explain how they arrived at their answers? (Multiple choice questions are such poor gauges of a person's line of reasoning.) Of course, not asking the respondents to explain their reasoning gives the testers greater latitude to arrive at spurious and fallacious conclusions.
Corante: technology, business, media, law, and culture news from the blogosphere
OUR PUBLICATIONS:
Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.
Corante Blogs
Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.
Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media
There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience
Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many
Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor
Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."
From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game
Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience
Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
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It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.
I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.
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The first - the ConversationHub - is a companion blog to Supernova 2007, the latest edition of Kevin Werbach's excellent conference on all things connected. As the conference site says: "Supernova examines the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy. As disparate physical and social networks link with one another, a new societal network is rapidly evolving... The New Network is greater than the sum of its parts. It challenges us to re-create everything from the software and hardware we use...to the business models we employ...to the information and entertainment we encounter...to the ways we work and play."
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1. Horse on May 2, 2005 06:45 PM writes...
This may not be true of Wason tests in general, but in the example test shown above, I'd argue the two questions are not logically equivalent.
I got the first wrong and the second right, as expected. But I got the first question wrong because I picked up on "and you have to make sure that student files for a class have been properly labeled" and inferred that for a student marking system the grade-number correlations must be exclusive - so for the files to be "properly labelled" only the D grade should have a 3 and a 3 should only be applied to a D grade - so you'd have to check all 4 files.
Now the final question doesn't support this inference, saying just "Pick only the card or cards that you have to turn over to see if any of the files violates the rule." But I'd argue this is in direct conflict with the first statement explaining the task.
So I don't know how much the given example demonstrates the supposed evolutionary difference - I think the two problems are not specified identically apart from the social context in one.
Permalink to Comment2. Brent M Krupp on May 2, 2005 07:23 PM writes...
I completely agree with Horse. That first question is horribly specified without any guidance on what we can assume or not (and if we're to assume nothing, well, I don't want to assume that). The second question involves concrete real-world details of ages and drinking so we know exactly what we can assume about the situation.
I'm hoping this is just a poorly explicated Wason Test and not that the Wason Test is crap. =)
Permalink to Comment3. Brent M Krupp on May 2, 2005 07:25 PM writes...
Woah -- delete my last comment (or ignore it). Carl updated the post while I was commenting. I like the new wording -- so what I said is now moot.
Permalink to Comment4. Horse on May 2, 2005 07:59 PM writes...
Heh, yep - the first question has been changed. I'll take that as vindication of my original criticism. :)
Permalink to Comment5. phanste on May 2, 2005 08:12 PM writes...
Perhaps it's because of finals week that I can't figure out how you got the answer for the first one. Does not having a "5" on one side automatically mean it doesn't follow the rule, so you wouldn't need to turn it over? How is it not "D" (where 3 could or could not be on the other side) and "3" (where D could or could not be on the other side)? 5 outright breaks the rule, does it not?
Permalink to Comment6. Heida Maria Sigurdardottir on May 2, 2005 08:24 PM writes...
No, 5 doesn't break the rule IF it has a letter on the other side that is NOT D (so you have to check if it is D).
Permalink to Comment7. phanste on May 2, 2005 08:31 PM writes...
What if the other side of F has a number that is not 3? Would that not too follow the rule?
Permalink to Comment8. Mike Hopkins on May 2, 2005 10:15 PM writes...
Well I got here after Carl reworded:
"a card with a D on one side has a 3 on the other side."
When I did it I did assume that we were supposed to make sure cards with a 3 had as well, i.e. looking for a 3-D card. Rereading the rule after I read the solution I see that I misinterpreted the instructions by making an unwarrented assumption. (You know about assumptions: they make a you know what of you and me.)
With the social example, there is nothing to interpret. I know the rules: an underaged person may not legally have ethanol but can have soda. Anyone twenty-one years or older can legally have the booze but does not have to.
I think it is really clear that this is not a logic problem per se since the actually logic is trivially obvious. It is a communication problem. It is easier to to communicate a problem when people already know the rules. This should not be surprising at all. And this leads to a prediction. If you in subtle manner reworded the second problem so that the adult had to have a beer, people who get the problem wrong in droves.
Permalink to Comment9. Jonathan Vause on May 3, 2005 04:53 AM writes...
I agree with Mike, the Wason test seems completely meaningless. People solve the second version of the test from memory, and get the first one wrong because actually they have to think, abstractly, about it - tricky - and don't absorb all the information before they answer. The real puzzle is why evolutionary psychologists get so excited about it.
Permalink to Comment10. Robert Karls Stonjek on May 3, 2005 07:20 AM writes...
There is an error in the form of the first question.
The logic being checked is a simple "If p then q", but Carl has omitted the IF from the first question.
The CORRECT answer to the first question is "All four".
If the question is asked as Michael Gazzaniga does in "The Mind's Past" P.168:
"Determine whether the following rule has any exceptions. If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other side.” He also stipulates that all cards have a number on one side and a letter on the other side.
Here is the logic: you only need to check the IF part of the statement ie only if there is an ‘F’ on the letter side of the card do you have to check to see if there is three on the other. The ‘letter’ side of the card may be obscured. A ‘3’ may be coupled with any letter.
IF you omit to stipulate that all cards have a letter on one side and a number on the other, then any of the four cards may have an ‘F’ on one side, but you don’t need to check the ‘3’ card if the ‘IF’ stipulation is made (ie you must check three of the cards).
If you omit the ‘IF’ part of the statement then one must check both the ‘3’ and the ‘F’ to make sure they are coupled correctly with the complimentary ‘F’ or ‘3’ and the other cards to make sure that they are not erroneously coupled with the ‘3’ or ‘F’ ie you must check all four cards.
Carl omitted the ‘IF’ so all four cards must be checked. Unfortunately, Carl has been caught in his own net and has shown that he had not properly understood the underlying logic, therefore the error.
But this is not a too terrible reflection on Carl as Cosmides and Tooby made a similar error – they omitted the explicit stipulation that all cards must have a number on one side and a letter on the other, so the correct answer to the original question as asked (by them) “all but the ‘3’ card”. See their book ‘The Adapted Mind”, Page 182. The roundabout way that the question is asked does not explicitly state that a number must appear on one side and a letter on the other, so F may appear on the other side of the card showing ‘D’.
In general, it is important to ask these questions correctly – there just might be someone with greater insight and intellect than yourself watching. An error in the question will result in a correct answer to the erroneous question but not to the classic problem – highly encephalated individuals don’t like their moderately equipped colleagues pointing the finger at their expense!
Kind regards,
Permalink to CommentRobert Karl Stonjek
11. Chris Ackerman on May 3, 2005 12:23 PM writes...
Normally I'm a fan of this blog, but Evo Psych and fMRI make for serious danger areas for bad science.
The Wason card test results might be compelling if they were found in people who were raised in isolation, ie, people who would have had as little practical experience with social exchange as most of us would with arbitrary logic puzzles. Then any differences would be attributable to genetically specified brain wiring. The happy rareness of such individuals means the tests must be conducted with normal people, who have had to solve reciprocal social exchange problems numerous times per day, every day of their lives. What's more, these problems will vary widely in their specifics, so a generalized representation will be easy to form, so as to map quickly to new problems. Nor is it required that this social exchange knowledge is represented in the mind in logical form, as the nativists seem to assume. Research studies (and informal observation) show that untrained people are quite bad at logic, so perhaps the knowledge is more naturally represented as learned associative pairings (I give-I don't get-danger!) where the activation of one part activates the others, drawing attention to the potential conflict.
The brain study adds nothing to all this nothingness; if there are differences in cognitive performance as displayed in the behavioral tests, how else might this be manifested but in differences in activity in some brain areas? And if you hold everything constant but the social exchange aspect, where else but in areas of the brain already known to be involved in representing social interactions would you expect to find this differentiated activity?
BTW, I got both problems right; maybe that's because I have the logic puzzle-solving gene, or maybe it's because I've seen these types of puzzles before.
Permalink to Comment12. Robert Karls Stonjek on May 3, 2005 08:39 PM writes...
Thanks to Carl Zimmer for updating the question with an 'IF' as I recommended and for acknowledging the minor error in an Email to me :)
Robert
Permalink to Comment13. Bryan (from SuspensionPhase.com) on May 4, 2005 12:24 AM writes...
This is a classic case of logic - that is: A -> B does not imply B -> A. I knew that, and still bombed on the first test. Had I given it thought, I'm sure I could've solved it correctly, but the whole idea is to trick you into thinking you know it.
I did fine on the second test, and I believe that, yes indeed, the reason people perform the way they do on the two tests is because we bring a scripted form of reasoning to the second one based on real world experience. In a way, it follows what Roger Schank has proposed in his book Dynamic Memory. He claims that we mostly solve problems through being reminded of previous similar circumstances, as opposed to truly working out all the gory details from first principles everytime. And when we encounter new situations, we remeber the exceptions of those new situations as compared to what we were most reminded of. Truly, we get through the day by applying our past experiences, rather than thinking too hard.
Permalink to Comment14. Lawrie Hunter on May 5, 2005 09:47 AM writes...
Hold on a second here: In version 1, ALL the cards need to be investigated: i.e. if the F card has a 3 on the back, it violates the rule. If the 5 card has a D on the back, it violates the rule.
em tasol
Lawrie
Permalink to Comment15. Nic on May 5, 2005 12:48 PM writes...
Close, Lawrie, but not quite "write". You need to leave F out of that since the first assumption is not asked to be questioned. There IS a letter on one side and not the other.
F cannot possibly have a D on the other side.
nic
Permalink to Comment16. Nic on May 5, 2005 01:09 PM writes...
D'oh! Answer was correct as given. For the 3,it doesn't matter what's on the other side. Any letter will fit the rules, as you all probably already knew.
Permalink to Comment17. david on May 7, 2005 01:54 PM writes...
In order to properly explain the premise of Test-1, you have to spend a fair amount of time explaining the assumptions. Even someone comfortable with logic and "letter" -> "number" notation has to read the problem and think about it. The symbols just don't differentiate themselves.
In Test-2, the real-world context bypasses all the need to explain the assumptions and the symbols. With no thought whatsoever, the symbols "drinks" and "ages" are easily differentiated.
Test-2 has the benefit of capitalizing on a pre-existing understanding that makes it easy to instantly absorb the task at hand. Test-1 does not. When the rules of the game map directly to preexisting experience, no time is needed to explain them.
It's not obvious to me that that's evolution speaking.
Permalink to Comment18. Lara Inis on May 7, 2005 08:25 PM writes...
1) Anyone with a grounding in logic would recognize that "if D, then 3" is logically equivalent to "if not 3, then not D". This immediately suggests that you turn over all letter cards with a D on them as well as all number cards without a 3 on them.
2) As pointed out by Bryan, many people think that if A implies B, then B implies A. (They may also confuse "if" with "only if", "implies" with "implied by", and "necessary condition" with "sufficient condition".) I had to disabuse a graduate student in physics of this misconception not long ago; I had expected better of someone holding a physics degree.
3) I, too, must agree with Mike Hopkins. Version 2 of the test concords with common practice in the US, and I suspect that at least some of those who answer this question correctly are merely falling back on their own experience. If the rule for version 2 was modified somewhat so that it deviated from common experience—say, "if a person is drinking soda, then he or she must be under 21 years of age"—I suspect that a smaller percentage would get it right (see previous point).
4) Rather than just having the respondents give their answers, wouldn't it be more instructive to ask them to explain how they arrived at their answers? (Multiple choice questions are such poor gauges of a person's line of reasoning.) Of course, not asking the respondents to explain their reasoning gives the testers greater latitude to arrive at spurious and fallacious conclusions.
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