Empathy has some unfortunate features — it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.

Drawing on decades of psychological research, Bloom articulates the problems with using empathy as a guide to how we ought to interact with others. As a matter of fact, we tend to empathize with the people who are near us, close to us, and similar to us. Consequently, empathy directs our attention to that one single baby who fell down the well but away from millions who are dying in a genocide, and empathy makes us take out our wallet for that one terminal cancer patient we know while ignoring so many others with treatable conditions who will die due to inadequate medical resources. Many of the worst problems in modern society don’t come from an insufficiency of empathy, but from an overload of empathy.

Empathy is the micro foundation for the macro structures of community. At the macro level, then, the problems of empathy becomes the problems of community.

Sure enough, the existence of a community has upsides. It’s what makes us pour our heart out to a baby who fell down the well — because she is one of us. But the existence of a community also has downsides that are arguably more severe. It’s also what makes us turn our heads away from millions who are dying in a genocide — because they are not part of our community.

Of course, we inevitably find ourselves as members of various communities. However, given how parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate a community can make us, we’re often at our best when we are smart enough to rise above it.

Over at 512 Pixels, Matt Alexander recently extolled the virtues of the Appleverse community:

[...] we read, link, joke, and support each other online — regardless of readership or Twitter follower counts — because this is a community built organically upon compassion and shared beliefs.

The problem of community, as you might have guessed, is that same support given to the insiders can quickly turn into vitriol thrown at outsiders. Will Kujawa found this out when he leveled some mild criticisms at the new The Loop iOS magazine. As he puts it,

This automatic tendency to support each other, while mostly good, unfortunately leads to suspicion when it’s suggested I spend money on something a friend or colleague of theirs is selling — whether it’s a book, an app or a magazine subscription — as they’re not always the most balanced source when it comes to the overall quality and value.

It’s probably a sisyphean task to completely rise above our communities. I won’t pretend that I have. Still, I think it’s worth trying.

If we can get part-way there, then maybe we can stop the talk about perceptions, press releases, and commercials, and just talk about interaction design, file architecture, and other far more interesting and actually substantive things. Maybe we can even worry less about who is right and wrong but instead more about what is right and wrong. And maybe, just maybe, we can try to interact with others as not insiders or outsiders of a community, but just people with some things to say.

Feel free to talk to me on Twitter: @RagingTBolt.

Starting Point 1: Silicon Valley’s diversity problem. This problem has been well documented. In fact, it is so bad that CNN Money had a hard time getting any straight data from some of the biggest tech companies like Apple and Google. Despite some valiant efforts, the problem remains as glaring as ever.

Starting Point 2: Morgan Stanley’s new investment initiative. As the New York Times reports,

Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division is starting a new portfolio which seeks to invest in companies that have demonstrated a commitment to including women on their corporate boards. The strategy, known as the parity portfolio, is scheduled to get going on April 1.

In a report last summer, Credit Suisse’s research institute found that over a six-year period, companies with “at least some” women on their boards did better, in terms of share price, than those with none.

[...] The strategy seeks to encourage companies to think deeply about the gender makeup of their boards. Only companies with at least three women board members will be included in the portfolio.

Why couldn’t there be something similar in tech?

My Audacious Proposal: An analogous parity venture capital fund that only funds startups with a diverse makeup. Of course, there can be reasonable disagreements about how to best operationalize the requirement. Perhaps it means that at least 50% of the founders need to be women. Perhaps it means that at least 40% of the engineers need to be women or other underrepresented minorities. Let us not quibble about detail for now.

A parity venture capital fund is potentially good business too. Morgan Stanley is no charity; there is a clear economic motivation behind its new initiative. There is some, though by no means conclusive, evidence that boards with some women simply perform better. Similarly, given what we know about gender and race’s power to bias people’s evaluations (previously discussed on this blog), it would be unsurprising if it turned out that startups with a diverse makeup are currently systematically overlooked. A parity venture capital fund would then be in a perfect position to exploit this market inefficiency.

So what say you, angels of the world?

(Or maybe the white dudes can all pitch before lunch?)

Feel free to talk to me on Twitter: @RagingTBolt.

Among these are: Matt Alexander calling what Google did with Reader in the RSS space “anti-competitive”, Marco Arment saying that Google engaged in “predatory pricing”, and of course all the usual people pointing to the fact that Reader was free to be the root of all evil.

The predatory pricing charge is strange. As the Wikipedia article Arment himself linked to explains, the predatory part of predatory pricing comes from the fact that a company uses low prices to gain a large market share… so that it can then raise the prices to an unreasonable level.

Clearly, that’s not what happened here. Yes, Google Reader did essentially own the RSS space. No, Google Reader never charged anyone a cent. The fact that Google is shutting down Reader makes it clear that predatory pricing is not even part of what Google wanted to do with Reader.

So what, you say. Arment may be a lesser Wikipedia economist than me, but Reader had a monopoly on the RSS market anyway. And everybody knows that monopoly = anti-competitive practices — even if “predatory pricing” turns out to be the wrong word.

Not so fast with that equal sign. Monopoly denotes a kind of outcome. Anti-competitiveness denotes a kind of practice. Not all monopolies result from anti-competitive practices. A natural monopoly is a kind of monopoly that results from an efficient market rather than any anti-competitive practices.

As far as I can see while scanning Wikipedia’s list of anti-competitive practices, Google Reader did nothing of that sort. Its pricing, as I said, was not predatory. Users were free to choose other services. There was no collusion. Users weren’t compelled to use Reader if they used other Google products.

Instead, Reader’s dominance of the RSS space looks to be to be a textbook example of a natural monopoly.

It’s so easy to forget now, but as Khoi Vinh reminded us, Google Reader was (and still is) a damn fine service.

Google Reader didn’t beat every other feed reader purely because it was free. Google Reader won because it was an extremely well-executed example of interaction design.

The technological superiority is even more apparent under the hood. Google Reader was (and still is) fast, powerful, and good at solving not-so-obvious problems like getting feeds from sites that don’t obviously have one. IT SYNCS. As many developers are discovering, Google Reader’s background plumbing is not easy to replicate now. It certainly was even harder to do then, when Google Reader came to its RSS dominance.

Finally — and this is the key — arguably it’s inefficient for the market to have many competing RSS plumbing services doing all the things that Google Reader does; it’s much more efficient for developers to build apps and secondary services on top of one. Indeed, that’s arguably what actually happened.

Be angry if you want. But let’s not distort the economic terms or revise history just to make irrational arguments that fit an agenda.

Feel free to talk to me on Twitter: @RagingTBolt.

• There seems to be some confusion about who the users of Google Reader are. They’re not just “tech” people, whatever that means. They’re infovores — people who just love to consume content. That group includes some tech people (but not others), and also many academics and journalists, among others.
• Aside: What is going to happen to all the RSS sponsorship deals? I know that RSS will live on, but you have to wonder about the audience numbers.
• On Quora, Brian Shih (former Google Reader product manager) gives an opinionated but informative overview of the history of Google Reader and why it had to die.
• Like many others, I’m investigating alternatives. I switched to The Old Reader briefly, a while back, but found its RSS crawling wanting. I’m no engineer, but I can’t imagine doing crawling and syncing at scale is all that easy. That’ll be the number one challenge for Google Reader replacements.
• Speaking of replacements, here are some that I’ve come across and will be trying: the aforementioned The Old Reader, Newsblur (which seems overwhelmed right now), Feedly (which promises a “seamless transition”), Fever (which is not for the non-tech infovores)… others?
• Even if some of these alternatives end up flourishing, I’m afraid we’ll never get back the golden age of Google Reader, when social tools like sharing and commenting were in full effect. The joy of consuming content together is only possible when other people are on the same platform. For me, what was great about Google Reader is that I can talk tech with tech people, politics with politics people, and so on. The inevitable fragmentation after the death of Google Reader will make consuming content together practically impossible for a long time. Best case scenario is that we get little enclaves for different topics.

Feel free to talk to me on Twitter: @RagingTBolt.

Gianfranco Baechtold, Laurent Beirnaert, Pierre Bouvier, Thibault Brevet, Raphaël Constantin, Lionel Dalmazzini, Edina Desboeufs, Arthur Desmet, and Thomas Grogan, DRM Chair (2013):

Let’s start at the beginning. Gassee’s best example concerns the limitations of Keynote, Apple’s own presentation maker:

There was a very basic demonstration of Keynote, iPad’s presentation app, plus the testimony of a happy customer who described the usefulness of the iPad in sales situations. All quite pleasant, but the Q&A session that followed was brutal and embarrassing: How do you compose real-world, mixed-document presentation? No real answer. Why can’t the iPad access all the documents — not just iWork files — that I dropped into iCloud from my Mac? No answer there, either.

In this case, the lack of an exposed file system is certainly a problem. But it’s not the problem. The problem is that the user cannot do what she wants to do. She can’t undertake her familiar workflow for putting together a presentation on iOS. The problem is that she cannot accomplish her task of putting together her presentation project.

Unfortunately, Gassee misdiagnosed the underlying conflict that the Keynote example reveals as ordinary users vs. power users:

[...] Apple could transform the iPad so that power users can see and combine data in ways that are impossible today. This could attract business customers who are hesitant about making the plunge into the world of tablets, or who may be considering alternatives such as Microsoft’s PC/tablet combo or Android devices with Google services.

The easiest decision is no decision. Let’s have two user interfaces, two modes: The Easy mode for my Mother-In-Law, and the Pro Mode for engineers, McKinsey consultants, and investment bankers.

That’s not right. Look at the Keynote example again. People who use Keynote don’t exactly fit under the standard definition of power users. If it helps, think of the lovely administrative assistants who put together flyers and posters using Keynote or other presentation tools. Even they want to insert their own illustrations on the flyers and posters. The Keynote example highlights a problem for them too. The frustration that the Keynote example points to is shared by ordinary users too.

The real conflict, as I’ve argued before, is between two workflows — environmentally-oriented vs. project-oriented — both of which are undertaken by nearly all users regularly. The real problem with iOS, as it currently stands, is that it simply prohibits the project-oriented workflow: it forces users to always think in terms of the tool to be used, not the task to be done. In this respect, the real problem is in a sense much less techie: sometimes we need lots of tools to get a task done. The lack of an exposed file system is only a symptom for the fact that we can’t wield multiple tools at once on iOS.

Once we recognize the real problem, it is also clear that Gassee’s proposed solution won’t work. You can’t just layer an interface for power users on top of the interface for ordinary users. You need to accommodate two distinct workflows that are undertaken by both ordinary and power users on a regular basis. iOS needs a revolution, not a mere evolution.

Feel free to talk to me on Twitter: @RagingTBolt.

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Dalton Caldwell of App.net, July 2012:

I have been working on a service called App.net for the past year. App.net is a paid service for mobile application developers.

Dalton Caldwell of App.net, February 2013:

Why now is the time to introduce a free tier

App.net was created to support and empower a vibrant ecosystem of applications built by 3rd-party developers. However, in the very beginning there was a significant chicken and egg problem: there were no 3rd-party apps. The good news is that at this point, the chicken-and-egg problem has been eliminated

You’re the chicken.

There are some eye-popping numbers there: $35000/month revenue, 25000 subscribers, and a handsome rate of $800 to the freelance writers to boot. But I’m not interested in those. Instead, I’m most interested in one of Arment’s insights that was lost on many others, including me.

How much are people willing to pay for a bottle of wine? You might think that the answer depends on how good the wine is, or on how much people like wine. You wouldn’t be completely wrong, but you also wouldn’t be completely right. In a striking experiment, behavioral economist Dan Ariely asked MBA students at MIT how much they’d pay for a bottle of 1998 Cotes du Rhone. However, and here’s the trick, he also asked them to write down the last two digits of their social security number before bidding on the wine. It turns out that those who have higher social security numbers (e.g. 99) bid higher for the bottle of wine.

What the experiment demonstrates is the anchoring bias, where our judgments are influenced by factors that we first encounter, even if these factors turn out to be highly irrelevant. It is a fundamental, and unfortunately rather incurable, human cognitive condition. It has been well studied by behavioral economists since Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky. And of course, the basic idea is well-known to street vendors of the world for centuries before that. Yet, surprisingly, there is little talk about anchoring bias when it comes to app ecosystems. Even more rare is the person who sees an opportunity in it.

Arment is that person, as it turns out. The most ingenious aspect of The Magazine is its exploitation of anchoring bias.

Magazines are a fluke on iOS: they have different price expectations. Big-name iOS magazines can easily charge $5 per month. The New York Times charges about $15 per month. So for The Magazine to be $2 per month sounds extremely inexpensive in the magazine world, yet that’s $24 per year — far more than I could earn per customer with a traditional app.

That quote is from Arment to Brooks. But it could also be a textbook illustration of the anchoring bias. Bravo, Marco, for seeing this manifestation of the human cognitive condition before others, and for seizing the opportunity that it presents.

[Editor's postscript: Obviously the post title is a bit tongue-in-cheek. No doubt there are other reasons for The Magazine's success. This is just what I thought was the most psychologically interesting one.]

Feel free to talk to me on Twitter: @RagingTBolt.

It’s a neoliberal shitshow. Its moral being: if individuals stop being racist or, more specifically, stop committing egregiously racist acts, like acts that even your five-year-old cousin can identify as racist, then VOILA, racism is gone. And then there’s certainly no need for systemic change, or consideration of how systemic inequity has perpetuated racism between individuals.

Crash is one of those movies that when someone says it’s one of their favorites, I have no choice but to dislike them.

Crash fans also wade into the comments of news articles to take issue with referring to George Zimmerman as a murderer because “we don’t have all the facts yet” and pride themselves on their objectivity. Related: I am a monster.

Honestly, there are too many golden lines to blockquote. Go read it. I can only hope my writing will one day live up to these heights. (My only disappointment is somehow the authors failed to work in a David Brooks putdown. Too easy?)

I am also going to assume that most, if not all, of us hold some implicit prejudices against women, non-whites, or other subordinate groups. As I said before, this assumption is quite well-supported by decades of research in the North American context, summarized here. If you are still skeptical, I invite you to try out some implicit association tests.

What can we do about the negative stereotypes that we implicitly hold? Clearly, being “gender blind” and “color blind” — contrary to what Andy Rutledge will have you believe — is not the answer. To do so is to give in to our lizard brains and to let our implicit prejudices win over our explicit anti-prejudicial commitments. (Again, if you don’t have these commitments, go listen to Skrewdriver.)

I want to suggest that boycott petitions and other explicit calls for diversity can have a kind of practical benefit that is only tangentially related to their stated goals. The upshot is that, whatever ambivalence you have about boycotts in general (and I have plenty), you should also take their hidden practical benefits into account.

I’ll focus on a recent research program by social psychologist Gordon Moskowitz and colleagues on suppressing implicit stereotypes. What they found is that one effective way to prevent the activation of implicit stereotypes is to prime people with egalitarian goals.

[Disclaimer: While the existence of implicit stereotypes is confirmed through decades of research, the work on the suppression of implicit stereotypes is relatively nascent. Apply appropriate caution.]

From Moskowitz’s review article on the implicit stereotype control:

In several experiments, the temporary priming of egalitarian goals was achieved in a fashion similar to Spencer et al. (1998) — by having people contemplate a failure. Research participants were asked to describe behavior from their recent past that clearly violated the egalitarian ideals they hold. In this case, the failure in question was regarding treating African Americans in an unbiased way. This failure at being egalitarian should trigger a goal to be egalitarian and initiate the inhibition of goals that are incompatible with being egalitarian, such as those that promote the activation of stereotypes.

[...] Do participants control the immediate and ‘automatic’ process of stereotype activation on a task that they do not know has anything to do with stereotyping? The answer is ‘yes’, but only if one had previously had an egalitarian goal triggered. Participants who write about a failure relating to a control goal show stereotype activation. However, people for whom egalitarian goals had been triggered showed stereotype inhibition — they respond slower to stereotype-relevant words (and only these words) following faces of Black, but not White, men.

[... in conjunction with other studies ...] Thus, simply thinking about being egalitarian does not lead one to stereotype less, striving to be egalitarian, having a goal, does.

Implicit stereotypes can therefore be implicitly inhibited — by striving for an egalitarian goal. To reach a bit, we might say that thinking about past failures and trying to be egalitarian are more effective for preventing the activation of implicit stereotypes than consciously suppressing those implicit stereotypes. So one thing we can do about the negative stereotypes that we implicitly hold is give ourselves a special kind of attentional misdirection.

You probably see the application to the current conversation on diversity in tech already. There are practical benefits to Matt Andrews’s pointing out a conference’s failure to have a female speaker and Rebecca Rosen’s petitioning for the boycott of such conferences. They (mis)direct our attention to egalitarian goals. Then, in striving for those egalitarian goals, we are less prone to the activation of harmful unconscious stereotypes that we all probably hold. So even if you don’t think something like a boycott is the right response at the end of the day, there can still be practical benefits that come from someone calling for it.

Feel free to talk to me on Twitter: @RagingTBolt.