My wife just emailed me this quote on writing. I can’t figure out if she’s encouraging me or insulting me. Ah, the wonderful mysteries of marriage.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell, Why I Write
In Designing Ideas Paul Scrivens reminds us that distraction-free writing apps aren’t new – typewriters and pen & paper have been around for a very long time. He then encourages us to look beyond our immediate time and medium for ideas on how to solve design problems:
The problem with designing new ideas is that we are too busy looking at what the people are designing around us to realize that many of the solutions to the problems we are facing have been solved already in a different time.
You will never be first with a new idea. You will be first with a new way to present the idea or a new way to combine that idea with another. Ideas are nothing more than mashups of the past. Once you can embrace that, your imagination opens up a bit more and you start to look elsewhere for inspiration.
This is partly why I’ve spent so much time reading up on architecture. It’s a mature, related craft that can teach us a great deal about web design – arguably more than Dribbble can.
I was reading an article called The Internet’s Battle For Our Digital Souls on Big Think when I stumbled on this sentence:
We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.
That just didn’t sit right with me. I’ve posted plenty of updates on Facebook and Twitter, and it definitely didn’t… ok, I’ll stop there. I don’t want this to get awkward. All I’m saying is that this doesn’t feel right. So I decided to trace the statement back to the original study that it’s talking about, to see what’s going on.
The post on Big Think appears to be a rehash of an article in the LA Times called Study helps explain why we over-share on Facebook, Twitter. The first thing I found interesting is that their conclusion about the sex thing is a little more measured:
In a series of experiments, the researchers found that the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating food, getting money or having sex. It’s all a matter of degrees of course, (talking about yourself isn’t quite as pleasurable as sex for most of us), but the science makes it clear that our brain considers self-disclosure to be a rewarding experience.
The LA Times links back to the original research paper, which has the decidedly less sexy title Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding (PDF link). The paper explains that the study was about whether or not people would give up money to talk about themselves (my emphasis added):
Just as monkeys are willing to forgo juice rewards to view dominant groupmates and college students are willing to give up money to view attractive members of the opposite sex, our participants were willing to forgo money to think and talk about themselves.
The word “sex” appears six times in the 6-page paper, and only once in the context that these other news stories use it. The “Discussion” section starts off as follows (my emphasis added):
Despite the frequency with which humans disclose the contents of their own thoughts, little has been known about the proximate mechanisms that motivate this behavior. Here, we suggest that humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex. Intriguingly, findings also suggested that both parts of “self-disclosure” have reward value. Although participants were willing to forgo money merely to introspect about the self and doing so was sufficient to engage brain regions associated with the rewarding outcomes, these effects were magnified by knowledge that on’s thoughts would be communicated to another person, suggesting that individuals ï¬nd opportunities to disclose their own thoughts to others to be especially rewarding.
Note that they talk about “rewards”, not “pleasure” like in the news stories. The core research hypothesis is that sharing about ourselves has intrinsic value. To quote from a different section (my emphasis added):
Interestingly, a number of earlier researchers have put forward the hypothesis explicitly tested here — that self-disclosure will act as an intrinsic reward; however, despite calls to do so, this notion has not previously been tested empirically. As such, the current study validates a long-standing hypothesis that self-disclosure arises — at least in part — from the subjective value associated with it.
No mention of sex there, whatsoever. It’s also important to know what the phrase “intrinsic value” means in the philosophical sense of the word, because it’s essential to understanding the results of the study:
The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.”
So let’s be very clear about what this research shows. The hypotheses tested (and confirmed) is that people like talking about themselves on social media because it has intrinsic value. In other words, we like sharing because it’s enjoyable for its own sake as a social activity. They make the point (in passing) that this is similar to other activities with intrinsic value such as food and, yes, sex. It’s not that posting on Facebook makes you feel the same way that having sex does. It’s that all these things share a common thread: the subjective, intrinsic value that they possess.
But hey, that message isn’t nearly going to rack up the same number of page views as saying that “We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.” I read so many “a new study suggests that…” articles that I just take at face value. Today I decided to read the actual research paper, and realized what kind of distortions happen the further you get from the source of a story. I’ll certainly be a lot more cautious about these kinds of stories going forward. Welcome to the new age of journalism, I guess.
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states the following:
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
Ian Betteridge explains his theory as follows:
The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
Betteridge’s point is that if a story had enough proof and citations, the headline would be assertive. Consider the latest story on TechCrunch, as of this writing: “Warren Buffett Is A Punk“. Regardless of its journalistic appeal, doesn’t that sound much better than “Is Warran Buffett A Punk?”. Headlines end in question marks when the authors want to retain a certain measure of deniability if their story turns out to be false (“Will iOS 6 Be Able To Make You Coffee?”).
However, lately these headlines have morphed into something beyond just a mixture of deniability and laziness: pure link bait. Consider a few randomly selected headlines from the last week:
The idea is to get people interested enough to click through, and then make them scroll past the ads until the answer (usually, “no”) is revealed in the last paragraph. It’s effective, but I just don’t think it should be done. Unfortunately I don’t have a business reason for my opinion, but I do have a reader reason.
I believe in respecting your audience’s intelligence, and not wasting their time. I believe in stating an article’s thesis and/or purpose clearly in the title, and trusting that if it’s interesting enough, the people you want on your site will click through and read it.
So, is it time to stop writing headlines that end in question marks? I’m going to break Betteridge’s Law and say, unequivocally, yes.
The best article I read all week is Eric Puchner’s The Cooler Me. Puchner wondered what his life would have been like if he had made different choices, so he set off to find his doppelgänger to see what he’s missing out on. The results are funny and poignant, and it’s just such a well-written article. If you’re a parent, I think you will particularly enjoy it.
It’s very long, and hard to quote from, but here are just a couple of paragraphs as a teaser:
For some reason, I told [my doppelgänger] Kyle about how I’d asked my daughter recently what she wanted to be for Halloween, and she’d said “a confused chicken.” This apparently meant dressing up like a chicken but pretending not to know what she was. I couldn’t help thinking she’d hit upon a deep ontological truth: the idea that who you were would be obvious to everyone else but yourself.
And shortly thereafter:
There’s a reason we drift toward attachment, I think, as we get older – attachment to people, to work, to things. As death moves closer, we try our hardest to dig in. We pound in the stakes so that our tents don’t blow away. Still, it makes sense to me that the perceptions we once had of ourselves would be hard to cast off. We miss our youth, our freedom — which is not the same thing as wanting it back. We may think it is, but it’s not. We’re all confused chickens.
But please, do yourself a favor and carve out some time this weekend to read the whole thing.
In The Irrationality of Irrationality Samuel McNerney discusses cognitive bias from an interesting angle. What if all the popular psychology books about this phenomenon, like Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, are actually complicit in strengthening some of our incorrect biases? He says:
People seem to absorb these books uncritically, ironically falling prey to some of the very biases they should be on the lookout for: incomplete information and seductive stories. That is, when people learn about how we irrationally jump to conclusions they form new opinions about how the brain works from the little information they recently acquired. They jump to conclusions about how the brain jumps to conclusions and fit their newfound knowledge into a larger story that romantically and naively describes personal enlightenment.
His observations on the power of narrative are also really interesting.
I just finished reading Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design. My closing remark on Readmill:
Highly recommended to anyone who wants to step back and get a sense of the state of design beyond the tools that we use. It makes us think about the reasons why we design, and how to give our work purpose and meaning. I found part 1 to be the strongest, but it’s a quick, easy read throughout.
You can follow the link to see the highlights I made – there are some really great quotes in there, such as this one:
Design doesn’t need to be delightful for it to work, but that’s like saying food doesn’t need to be tasty to keep us alive. The pedigree of great design isn’t solely based on aesthetics or utility, but also the sensation it creates when it is seen or used. It’s a bit like food: plating a dish adds beauty to the experience, but the testament to the quality of the cooking is in its taste. It’s the same for design, in that the source of a delightful experience comes from the design’s use.
In related news, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this on the Readmill app for iPad. I will try to read books with this app whenever possible from now on, with the Kindle as a backup if I can’t find the book as DRM-free ePub. The reader itself needs a bit of work to get to the standard that iBooks set, but the social features are really great. I love seeing who else is reading the book I’m reading, what they’ve highlighted, etc. Readmill embraces the digital reading experience in the best way that I’ve seen so far.
Hey, I dislike the word “gamification” as much as the next guy. The topic of game mechanics has been twisted and applied to everything with almost as much success as the recent “infographic” craze. And yet, I can’t help but link to this excellent post by Michael Lopp. In Two Universes he provides one of the few worthwhile explorations of game mechanics in software that I’ve seen:
The plethora of online Photoshop tutorials demonstrate its power and its flexibility, but I believe they also demonstrate its poor design. Think about it like this: what if each time you plunked down in front of World of Warcraft, you had to spend an hour trying to remember, wait, how do I play this?
Great design makes learning frictionless. The brilliance of the iPhone and iPad is how little time you spend learning. Designers’ livelihood is based on how quickly and cleverly they can introduce to and teach a user how a particular tool works in a particular universe.
His observations on what it takes to motivate people to learn are spot on.