Professional Advice & Finger Food

The day I turned 50 an AARP application arrived in the mail. Screw AARP. One advantage of being a gray beard is that the Ski Patrol lets you stray outside the ski area boundaries without bothering to check your pack for an avalanche beacon or a shovel.

The Ski Patroller assumes you've had a good life and is comfortable knowing that hypothermia is a pleasant way to die. 

The other advantage is that one earns the right to give advice knowing it's rude for polite folk not to listen to gray beards.

Professional Advice

1. Be Flexible
2. Cultivate Humility
3. Question Assumptions

Be Flexible If someone gives you a doll-house-sized white plate attached to a ring, then make a tiny sandwich and call it finger food. Longevity in the work force depends on Yoga and Jujitsu rather than Power Lifting grunts and Bruce Lee theatrics.

Make it a habit to be flexible, agile, and accommodating. You might think you're destined to be a tennis ball...

I think Pringles original intention was to make tennis balls... but on the day the rubber was supposed to show up a truckload of potatoes came. Pringles is a laid-back company, so they just said, "Fuck it, cut em up!"

   ~Mitch Hedberg

Cultivate Humility One could spend a life seeding and watering humility, then never have a bumper crop. That's okay. The penultimate in humility is an okay crop. The ultimate in humility is its dastardly flip-side hubris.

You'll probably never have the right amount of humility. Still, you can be diligent about weeding out hubris.

We are all one black swan from being homeless.

   ~Bobtuse

Toyota's hubris is about to tank its quality reputation (see How Toyota Can Find Its Way Back). The black swan of electromagnetic interference that seems to be causing gas pedals to stick has Toyota engineers scratching their heads and Toyota management too proud to fess up to systematic flaws.

Question Assumptions Be as pesky as a corn-stealing crow with assumptions. It's human nature to be lazy so most of us formulate strategies based on notions and whims, rather than on data. Is what you think is true really true?

If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance

   ~Orville Wright

Usually data are better than notions and whims. VP of Search Products & User Experience at Google Marissa Mayer expresses a familiar Google mantra,

Data is apolitical. 

Of course, data might be biased, misunderstood or misapplied. If your assumptions are based on data, are you collecting the right data?

There are assumptions made in this seemingly far-fetched laissez-faire capitalism scenario:

First sharks grow legs to become LAND Sharks. Then LAND sharks morph into LOAN sharks. These LOAN sharks offer unsecured loans to unsuspecting consumers at astronomical rates by burying the terms of the loans in fine print.

Implausible? Perhaps. Yet stranger things have happened.

Most things we consider to be facts are little more than hypotheses that have yet to be disproven.

100% Coverage is a Crock of Clam Juice

Marking, a kindred spirit from a faraway place high above Point Defiance near Old Town Tacoma, was in the Twin Cities for a visit last night. One of Marking’s quirks is that he’ll passionately engage you with various topics from non-violent conflict resolution to single-payer health care, but if you ask him about his profession, he instantly becomes a clam with lockjaw.

But last night, while dodging rotten tomatoes at the Artists' Quarter poetry slam, I cracked the calcified exoskeleton of Marking's professional ennui.

Like shucking clams with a catcher's mitt, I tried my best to explain what I learned about Black Swan theory from Nassim Taleb's influential book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Marking is a radiologist. When Marking is not marking time day-dreaming about his next day off, he uses imaging technology, like x-ray and radiation, to evaluate the likelihood of disease.

Marking grinned like a giddy mollusk when I laid out Nassim Taleb's Round-Trip fallacy like this

You can tell your patient there is No Evidence of Disease (NED), but cannot tell him that there is Evidence of No Disease (END)

Sadly, END is probably how the patient prefers to hear the diagnosis, but NED is what the report says.

Marking intimates that his profession is a crock of clam juice because the reports radiologists produce, after examining a chest film that falls within a normal range, have marginal clinical value. Many of his colleagues will order an ongoing series of baseless tests to confirm what they know for fear of litigation (e.g., Taleb calls this the Confirmation Fallacy) .

Marking's colleagues remind me of software professionals like us who make Zero Defect Pledges, or who shoot for 100% Code Coverage. We mindlessly pad our tests with meaningless test assertion after meaningless test assertion to confirm the obvious.

Coverage numbers give false security. In The Fallacy of 100% Code Coverage, Andrew Binstock says the raison d'être of unit testing is two-fold:

1. validate the operation of code; and
2. create sensors that detect when code operation has changed; thereby identifying unanticipated effects of code changes.

Beyond that, please ask yourself, am I full of clam juice?

The Fallacy of 100% Code Coverage

The fallacy of 100% Code Coverage is this

Just because you have attained 100% code coverage does not make it significantly more certain you haven't forgotten to test some critical chunk of code.

No Evidence of Defects (NED) is not the same as Evidence of No Defects (END). Sometimes a meaningful conclusion from test coverage is downright Rumsfeldian:

I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started. --Donald Rumsfeld

The (END).

Beware The Seductive Narrative

I know little about who reads this blog, but I am smitten with ClustrMaps's geographic mashup widget.

A Bobtuse Bobservations ClustrMap charts visitors from Argentina to New Zealand with red dots scaled to volume.

I seem to have developed a fatal attraction to the statistics logged and lipsticked by FeedBurner.

FeedBurner's allure is its charting dashboard; it sashays subscriber numbers across a plot that sings a siren-song of your "reach" over time. It lures you with its come-hither page click tallies for each blog post.

If we could tap into the Delphic oracle for nascent blog-writers, we might have found the prescient heuristic Know Thy Audience.

But what do these data tell us?

Examining these data, it is easy, actually, rather seductive, to construct self-serving narratives. For example,

• this blog is widely read;
• blog readership is growing; or
• everyone, but the space shuttle astronauts, reads this blog
  

The Narrative Fallacy, brought to our attention by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, refers to the human tendency to construct narratives around facts.

The danger, and the essence of the narrative fallacy, comes when we believe these stories as truths, and worse yet, when we begin to accommodate and massage our facts to fit into our stories.

What starts as raw data, becomes, through our cognitive filters, misleading. Humans like to summarize and simplify. We like to find convenient and comforting patterns in data.

One story that might evolve from a cursory look at the Bobtuse Bobservations ClustrMap is

This blog has 9 loyal followers in Wellington, New Zealand.

Although an equally plausible story might be

This blog was visited by 1 person in Wellington, New Zealand who had inadvertently landed here after searching "flightless birds".

So, use data feeds from ClustrMaps or FeedBurner - or any data for that matter - to your heart's content. But, beware the seductive narrative. Resist the temptation to believe the stories you might weave around the data (e.g., see my post 100% Coverage is a Crock of Clam Juice).