Scrapnotes

Why did Steve Jobs always wear the same thing?

I’ve just listened to a Mixergy interview with Jonathan Fields on the subject of dealing with uncertainty. (Note the interviews are only free to watch for a few days, though you may find them later on the podcast feed.) This bit made something click:

So everything that happens, all the mundane stuff in their life around, they created a process, it becomes completely ritualized. They drop certainty anchors left and right. They wake up the same time, they eat exact same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner, they wear the same clothes, they work out the same time, listen to the same music. And it creates this sense of, “OK. I know there are enough things in my day that I can count on being, I know what they’re going to be, so that I can go to that place in the work, where I don’t know how it’s going to end up”.

And, when I talk to people about this, a lot of them start to realise that they’re doing this unintentionally but it was something that became, it was like a chance to touch stone in their lives. Where they felt like they can come back down and it was always there and it gave them a sense of grounding that they felt allowed them to go to that place. Where in their work they could really create on that higher level.

I’ve never quite understood why people like Steve Jobs wore the same clothes day after day. They’ve said that it is so they don’t have to think about it, but that answer never quite made sense to me. I mean, how much effort does it take to decide what to wear?

Jeans annnnd… this shirt. Done.

But hearing this, it suddenly made more sense. It was probably hearing that certain people eat the same thing every day. I do that. Not for dinner usually because I eat dinner with others, but breakfast and lunch and snacks. As much as I can, I have the same thing every day.

I’m starting to think about the wider context of this. We seem to create balance for ourselves subconsciously.

I’ve noticed that depending on what I’m working on really affects the kind of things I do in my spare time. I watch more TV when I’m stressed, but usually I have to make myself watch anything. If I haven’t done enough socialising, I have to talk to people online. If I’ve done too much, I’ll become much quieter in social situations. That kind of thing.

And I’ve been reading the Kindle sample of Clay Shirky’s book, Cognitive Surplus where he talks about the gin craze of the 18th century amongst the working class trying to deal with the difficult new life of the city. The modern equivalent, he says, has been sit-coms.

It’s an interesting argument and I hope to return to that book. But the Steve Jobs biography is due in a few hours so it will have to wait!

Talking of which, there was an excerpt from that book talking about this subject posted by Gawker. I’m hoping the book will say more about the reasoning, but this at least gives a bit of extra background -> http://gawker.com/5848754

Kindle Pricing

It’s an often used marketing ploy: you give the customer 3 choice to help them make the middle decision.

Kindle

Kindle Touch

Kindle Touch 3G

“hmm, the Kindle is only $79. Maybe I will get one. Why not, at that price?” Impulse purchase.

“Kindle Touch is only $20 more, and I get that extra functionality. Would be silly not to. It’s not like I’m getting the expensive 3G one.”

The pricing is complicated a bit by the extra cost of getting one without ads, the continuing availability of the old keyboard Kindle 3s and in Britain they don’t even have the Touch versions available which is interesting. In Britain they also have the price set at £89 which is currently the equivalent of $138. 

But if I lived in America and didn’t own a Kindle already I imagine I’d be purchasing the Kindle Touch for $99.

Remove the cheap Kindle from the lineup and, in theory, the number of people purchasing the middle priced Kindle will also fall.

United States risk killing an innocent man tonight

Apparently emails are being blocked, but this is an email that I at least tried to send to the people who are risking executing an innocent man tonight; legally; in the United States of America where is still considered acceptable to commit capital punishment.

Some in my country want to reintroduce it, but I think enough people are against it that we won’t return to such a barbaric practice.

I have always struggled to believe that a first world democratic country would continue to perpetrate what is essentially legalised murder. It is revenge, not justice, not financially cheaper, and does not reduce crime.

But even for those who haven’t been convinced that it should be abolished, I would hope that they would at least find it unacceptable when the guilt of the condemned is in such doubt.

Here’s one piece for background http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/21/troy-davis-10-reasons

Here’s that email:

Dear Clemency Board members:

You are no doubt being inundated with emails pleading you to reconsider your decision regarding the execution of Troy Anthony Davis. Over here in England, we of course do not know the details of this case anywhere near as well as you do, so what right do we have to ask you to grant mercy on this man?

As you are probably aware, in the United Kingdom no crime is punishable by death. Our last execution took place in 1964, was officially abolished for murder in 1969 and for all other remaining offences in 1998. Justice is still served here. We simply do not commit the same act as the criminal in order to serve it. No one has been executed in my lifetime in this country so I have grown up finding the idea of capital punishment shocking. I struggle to remind myself that a free country like the United States still has not abolished it.

One reason for this attitude is the concern that mistakes might be made and innocent people may be killed for no reason. To spend a life in prison for a crime you didn’t commit is horrible. To be killed because of a mistake is beyond words.

But your country and your state has not abolished it. So you find yourself with a life in your hands. There are doubts about his guilt.

The eyes of the world are watching and we are praying for you to make the right decision. Even though I would like the United States to move forward and abolish capital punishment completely, wielding the legal power to end someone’s life must surely be carried out with only the surest of convictions.

Please be sure you are not guilty of killing an innocent man tonight.

Regards,

Alan Pritt

Things I did today

• Learnt to fly
• Swam in a pool of lava
• Had a date on the moon
• Chatted with a cross dresser
• Went to a live gig
• Drove a Ferrari
• Took a cab ride and didn’t pay (feel bad about that)
• Swam with sharks
• Danced in a room of naked people (I was one of the few who stayed dressed)
• Had sex twice
• Only after that did I find myself a free detachable penis
• Sat on top of a floating rabbit
• Waited for a bus
• Developed a headache

The headache was real. Everything else happened in my Second Life.

Last time I got curious about Second Life was four and a half years ago according to my account details. I couldn’t do anything then, because my computer was too slow. Today I managed to explore quite a lot more.

There’s something I find very captivating about the idea of a virtual world where people live a life without the restrictions of the real world. And for a few hours I found it totally addictive.

But now I feel like I’ve done everything I could possibly care to do and more. Perhaps in a few more years, when the graphics are better and there is more to do on there, it might become a place where it makes sense to hang out, perhaps even work or educate ourselves. Some, it seems in some small way, are finding it such a place already. But I can’t see past the novelty factor yet.

I’ll check back on it in a few years and see how it develops. But for now, after a few addictive hours in this strange world, the novelty has already worn off. Back to reality for now. I’ve deleted Second Life.

There IS a market for tablets

Quoting from: There Is No Tablet Market:

There is an growing notion that it is impossible to compete with the Apple iPad. The tablet market isn’t a tablet market. It’s an iPad market and it is largely limited to Apple. Does that mean that PC makers have to surrender?

And:

Would it matter, if there was a perfect Android-iPad clone? Would you buy it? My arrogant prediction: You won’t and if you do, you will be in the minority. Most people will stick with an iPad since it has the necessary platform support Android lacks. Android would need Windows and Chrome OS interoperability, a compelling and unique feature set and it would need a lot more apps. Success would even be questionable then. We should accept at some point that simply because Apple can sell a tablet, it does not mean that Acer, Samsung or HP can as well.

And:

In that sense, we believe that the tablet market, in fact, is limited to the iPad. It may be a waste of time for everyone else to build something that can only be a copy of the original

I wasn’t paying attention to what pundits were saying in the 90s, but to me this sounds like someone claiming there was no market for desktop computers a decade and a half ago, but rather only a market for Windows computers. Although Windows still dominates, Apple has since made a comeback in the desktop computer market (though frequently in the form of a laptop these days) by going back to building something that people want again and slowly winning people over. The market always existed, but winning over customers was never easy.

Today’s tablet market is dominated by the iPad because Apple have built a device that people want. Similar products have not been built by the competition to the standard that people want or at the price they are willing to pay for them. That doesn’t mean the market doesn’t exist. It just means nobody else has built something many people want yet.

So should Microsoft and Google and HP and the other outsiders stop trying and move onto figuring out the next thing?

Not really.

I look at Apple’s product range over the past decade and see no grand ideas that originated from them. MP3 players existed before the iPod. Smart phones existed before the iPhone. Tablets existed before the iPad.

I’ve always thought of the iPhone in the same way that Steve Jobs introduced it. It’s a phone + an iPad + a decent web browser.

And as much as it usually annoys me when people have described the iPad as just a larger iPod Touch, that really is what it is.

But I’m not dismissive of these devices because people manage to describe them in a simple way. They sell because Apple put in so much work on the boring little details that make these devices good. And, crucially, they have plans on how to market and sell these things to consumers.

If companies give up on tablets now and concentrate on thinking up the next computer device, Apple will come along when they are ready and build a better version of that new thing and it will sell. Because Apple build decent stuff that people want.

Likewise, if a company builds a tablet and gets the combination of price, quality, features, interoperability and marketing right, they will find a market. No company other than Apple have yet to do that, which is why iPad sales are so vastly superior. The market exists. Their competition just needs to do a better job at building decent stuff.

What does 50% in AV actually mean?

Therese Coffey, the Conservative MP for Suffolk Coastal, has kindly been responding to me in a discussion on the Alternative Vote (AV). It started with this tweet from her:

Bbc continues to pump rubbish that to win with AV requires >50% of vote when its own R5L test showed you didn’t. Bias? #no2AV

To which I responded:

Of course a candidate needs more than 50% of the vote. That’s fundamental to how the system works.

After all, it’s right there in the description of how the system works right? If no candidate has reached 50%, you proceed to another round until they do. If you didn’t have to reach more than 50% how would you know who has won?

So let’s say it is the second round and Conservatives have 48%, Labour 30%, Lib Dems 12% and Greens 10%. Nobody has more than 50% of the vote so we go to the third round. Greens are knocked out and now Conservatives have 52%, Labour 34%, LibDems 14%. The conservative candidate has more than 50% so has won.

But what would happen if you continued the system to its logical conclusion? LibDems get knocked out and all their next preference votes go to Labour. Now Labour have 48% of the vote and the Conservatives have 52% still. Obviously the Conservatives have still won.

You could even go another round. Labour get knocked out and now Conservatives obviously have 100% of the vote.

Wow! 100%! Everyone loves the Conservatives. Absolutely one hundred percent of everyone!

Of course not. That’s ridiculous.

But for the same reason neither does having greater than 50% mean that the majority of the electorate really support them.

So why is 50% important then? Well notice that the winner didn’t change in those last two rounds. Once the Tories had reached 52% of the vote, Labour was hardly going to overtake them and get 53% of the vote because otherwise the total number of votes would have to be 105%. Even if those LibDem voters have no further preference and so their votes are dropped from the total number of votes, the Conservatives can’t mathematically drop below 50% again. Their percentage can only stay the same or get higher. Once you hit the majority you are guaranteed to continue having the MOST votes in future rounds.

So getting 50% of the vote simply means, stop counting because there really is no point in continuing.

This is a statement made on the Yes to AV campaign website:

Your next MP would have to aim to get more than 50% of the vote to be sure of winning. At present they can be handed power with just one vote in three.

Therese Coffey takes issue with this. And you know what, so do I. While the statement is true, aiming for 50% is the only way you can guarantee winning with first past the post too! Sure, they can get in power with far less than that, but if they aimed for less they couldn’t be absolutely sure of it.

The second statement is more complicated, because it’s not clear what a vote actually means when there are potentially several rounds of votes. And it ignores eligible voters who don’t vote for anybody.  

That 50% doesn’t mean anything different to saying they must get a 100%. The only reason we stopped counting at 50% was because we have now reached a stage where the winner won’t change. 

What does 50% mean then?

Let’s say we’ve taken it to a round with just the Conservative and Labour candidates left. The results are Conservatives 70% and Labour 30%. All we can say is that 70% wanted the Conservative candidate to win over the Labour candidate. And that 30% wanted the Labour Candidate to win more than the Conservative.

We can’t say 70% of voters wanted Conservatives to win. Half of the Lib Dem supporters may have not put down either Labour or the Conservatives as a preference at all in which case their vote won’t be counted. And anyway, there is a difference between a vote that says I really want Lib Dems to win, but if not as long as it isn’t Labour I’m happy; than saying I support Conservatives.

What Therese Coffey wants to do though, is compare that final count of votes to the total number of people who voted in the 1st round (i.e. ‘total cast ballots’) including those dropped LibDem votes.

Me:

 … stating a candidates final round count as a % of 1st round votes cast is meaningless. Each round is separate

Coffey:

I completely disagree it is the share of the people who actually cast a vote - not meaningless at all but smokescreen from yes2AV

A smokescreen perhaps, but if it isn’t meaningless what DOES it actually mean?

Much of this debate is based around this mock election from BBC Radio 5. The results are presented in a table on the Guido Fawkes website.

Okay, so in this example the winner apparently got 49% of total votes cast. The final result was Labour 49%, Greens 41.7% and no preference 9.3%. If this seems odd to you, I’ll address that in a moment. But first, what does that 49% mean here in this scenario?

Well 49% is the percentage of people who thought at least one candidate was worth voting for who also think out of the remaining candidates that Labour is the best one.

So what?

In each round every eligible voter effectively has the opportunity to say ‘this is my favourite of these candidates’ or ‘I don’t care I like/dislike them all the same’. There is nothing special about the first round.

Lets say I wanted to vote for the Green Party as my first and only preference. But then the Green Party withdraw their candidate. I don’t have a second preference so who do I vote for? Well nobody. I don’t have another preference so I just don’t vote.

But what if the Green Party hadn’t withdrawn? Well now I’d put them as my first preference. In this scenario they come last, so we go to round 2. Round 2 is exactly the same as the first round in the previous example. Except some people argue that I’m a voter in this example but not in the previous example. Why?

If we added a box that said ‘None of the above’ for people who didn’t like any candidate, the number of ballots cast would increase and the percentage would change again. That’s interesting survey data, but it doesn’t alter in any way the result of the election. All we are doing is playing with numbers and confusing people.

The Radio 5 BBC mock election makes no sense. They counted the non votes but that’s not how the system works.

As it turns out though, counting the results this way wouldn’t really affect the final result. All that could happen is you would continue to count the votes even after no other candidate could overtake the candidate in the lead. An extra round would just mean everybody got to bed a little later. 

The 50% only makes sense in the context of a single round. If a candidate receives a majority in a single round of votes it means that the majority of voters in that round would not prefer any of the other remaining candidates. If they get less than 50% it means there might be a candidate left who is preferred by more voters than the candidate currently in the lead. Anybody who never voted at all or has no preferences left are all saying I don’t care who wins out of this remaining lot.

Let’s say you have two right wing candidates and one left wing candidate. In the current system, if half the voters were right wing and half left wing, the left wing candidate would have an advantage because right wing votes get split between two candidates. AV fixes that bias.

And that’s pretty much all it really does. Personally it allows me to vote for Lib Dems instead of the Conservatives without fear of wasting my vote that could have counted against Labour getting in. If my Labour candidate ever reaches over 50% of the vote in any round, then my Lib Dem vote wouldn’t make any difference anyway. But if they are under 50% my vote can be transferred to the Conservatives and they might win.

The reason changing the system like this makes sense is round two is how I would have voted had the Lib Dems never entered a candidate at all.

(Which is also why the first round using the alternative vote is not the same thing as the result of first past the post. People will vote differently.)

That doesn’t mean I particularly like any of the candidates or think they will do a good job. I cast my vote based on who I prefer compared to whoever else is running. That’s all that really matters. Yes, turnout matters as an indication of how much people think the election matters as a whole, but for determining who wins it only matters who has the MOST votes. First Past the Post declares the winner based on who has the most votes and the Alternative Vote does the same. It does not force a situation where candidates are liked by a majority of the electorate. It simply goes a long way to fixing the split votes problem.

How high the percentage of votes is doesn’t mean anything useful. Getting 52% in the first round does not show the same level of support as getting 52% in the fifth round. And of course, getting 52% with a voter turnout of 10% is very different than with a voter turnout of 90%. In my opinion, focusing on these raw figures out of context does more harm than good and makes the system seem more complicated than it is.

And of course, I’ve engaged in it and probably made it sound even more complicated. But trust me when I say, I can make first past the post sound complicated too! This is why I don’t run or really engage in any political campaigns! Instead I quietly think through the issues and put out a rare detailed post that most people won’t read.

Anyway, whatever the result of this referendum kudos to @theresecoffey MP for engaging in a debate with a stranger over Twitter.