roll for initiative

And here’s my final offer for 2008 dream tickets, take it or leave it:

(And yes, again … it could be Gates/Oprah in 2008.)

I call this one the “Compassionate Rationality” ticket.

Hmmm … or we could call it “If we only had a brain … AND a heart”.

Billg would be the benevolent technocrat … using science, rationality, and technology to address our nations top issues. (Note, that when I say Billg, I’m referring to the Bill Gates who funds the worlds largest charitable foundation, not the Billg who ran Microsoft - people tend to like the former but not the latter.)

As some of you will note, pure unmitigated rationality can be a bit cold. So … we add one part Oprah to warm the ticket a little.

Billg and his cranially super-endowed cabinet would propose rational policies to address issues like health care, taxation, foreign policy, immigration, etc., etc., etc. While Oprah would be the heart of the operation, bringing actual compassion the White House. And she’d make a great foreign ambassador. What world leader could resist her charming ways? Kim Jung-Il would immediately disarm and begin democratisation after Oprah talked to him and got him to open up about his difficult childhood.

Yeah, so they’re a bit short of on the political experience department. However, at least we’d have smart people running the show again.

Man, remember back when the biggest problem our country was facing was weather or not the President got a blowjob? Wow, those were the days…

I’ve been thinking about another potential dream ticket for the Democrats in 2008.

Don’t get me wrong, Hillary/Obama or Obama/Hillary would be awesome. But in case they Hillary and Barack can’t put aside their differences, here’s another possibility:

Oprah/Obama ‘08

or it could just as easily be

Obama/Oprah ‘08

In any case, my slogan for them is “O2 in ‘08 - a breath of fresh air”. (Not bad, if I do say so myself.)

Why O2 in ‘08? Because everyone loves Oprah. And the more people know him, the more people like Obama.

Which is not to say that the more people know him the more they like him. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one. It’s been said (and been said by people way smarter than I) that Obama’s playing a tight game. He’s doing all the wooing and saying all the right things … but he’s also taking care not to say any of the wrong things.

Here’s his official position on the issues. You’ll notice that there’s nothing there about abortion. (And strangely, there’s no search function on that site, so one can’t search the Senator’s official site for his “official” position on a very important issue.) However, you can do a Google search and find various oblique references to Obama’s Pro-Choice position.

But that’s not my main point. My main point about the O2 in ‘08 ticket is that it would freakin’ RAWK! Yeah, yeah, they’re both from Illinois so the technically can’t be on the same ticket, but that’s why Cheney moved to Wyoming (damn that pesky 12th Amendment). He was from Texas but that’s where Ivy League Bush wanted to go to be more folksy. So, Oprah’s got houses (estates?) in CA and NY and maybe someplace else so it wouldn’t be too difficult to pull a Slick Dick around that issue.

Oh yeah … let’s get back to the O2 ticket. Oprah is Oprah. She’s beloved by millions. She’ll make you laugh, she’ll make you cry, she’ll give you things from “Oprah’s favorite things” list. I think the reason she’s so popular is because she’s got mad EQ (that’s Emotional Quotient, y’all). She has this amazing ability to connect with millions of people in a very intimate and personal way. Okay, yeah I heart Oprah. I can’t catch her every day (you know that whole work thing), but if I’m flipping through the channel and she’s on I’ll stop and get sucked in for a spell.

As for Obama, to hear him is to love him. Those of you who remember his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 know of which I speak. That skinny black kid blew my socks away. If you’ve got some time, it’s worth a watch. Part 1 and Part 2. Obama’s got as much charisma as Oprah’s got EQ.

My completely uninformed guess is that she would take about 75% of the woman vote. And O2 would take 99% of the black vote and 80% of the other minority vote. And even if they take only 40% of the white male vote their landslide with other demographics would take them all the way to 1600.

Who’s ready for some fresh air?

Election 2008 is ON!

Various candidates have exploratory committees and it’s pretty much guaranteed that both Hillary and Obama are going to make a run for the ol’ White House.

According to this Newsweek article, Hillary beats everyone, including McCain and Obama. Barack does pretty well, too, but he looses to McCain.

Me, I like both Hillary and Barack, but both are caught in a kind of electability Catch-22. I think most people would say they like Hillary and Barack. And I think they would like to vote for either one of them, too. But these people will say that they aren’t going to vote for H or B because they think that Hillary and Barack are “unelectable”, unelectable because “most people” won’t vote for them. I do think most people aren’t concerned by and probably don’t want the race to be gender- or race-ified, but because they think that race and gender matter to the “average” voter, race and gender are going to end up mattering. It’s a race-to-the-bottom Catch 22 that’s going to end up hurting two very good candidates.

All of this is a bit problematic for Hillary and Barack. Most people would vote for them save for the fact that most people don’t think most people would vote for them. If said “most people” would stop worrying about what other “most people” would do then the candidate that “most people” liked might get the most votes …

(Honestly, this is hardly an original thought. If it weren’t for Source Amnesia, I’d say that I’d heard this originally on NPR, but that’s a safe bet since 90% of my “original thoughts” actually come from NPR.)

In any case, as Balmer would say, let’s break free from the Tyranny of Or … and let’s go with a super Democratic ticket for 2008 - the Hillary-Barack 2008 ticket. Or really, it could just as well be the Barack-Hillary 2008 ticket. Or they could both be co-Presidents. Maybe Hilary can take foreign policy and Barack can do the domestic management. I really don’t care how they split it.

I just want people who are smarter than me in charge of running the country again. Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?

Reading (and writing) about the Curse of Knowledge yesterday got me thinking about source amnesia.

In another life, a long long time ago, I was working on a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, studying memory and the fallibility thereof. One concept I researched was source amnesia.

Source amnesia describes the phenomenon of when you forget when or where you learned something while still retaining the factual knowledge. In essence, you forget the source of your knowledge but you retain the actual fact.

Source amnesia is different from retrograde amnesia where you forget your biographical knowledge - the classic TV type of amnesia. It’s also different from anterograde amnesia, where you retain everything you know up to a point but are unable to learn or retain anything new - like HM, the classic anterograde amnesiac.

To understand source amnesia, I think it’s helpful to break memory down into various sub-components. One way to slice it is to differentiate between declarative memory and procedural memory. Declarative memory is knowledge of facts and events, while procedural memory is knowledge of how to do stuff.

Declarative memory can be further divided into two sub-categories - “what” memory (i.e., “semantic memory” or knowledge of facts) and “when” memory (i.e., “episodic memory” or knowledge of specific events or moments in time that you have experienced).

Back to source amnesia … when you learn something new it becomes part of your declarative memory. Specifically, it becomes part of your semantic memory. For some reason, information about the specific episode that resulted in you learning something new is rarely encoded in episodic memory. As a result, you retain the new fact you just learned in semantic memory, but you don’t store the associated event-related information in episodic memory … and voilà - source amnesia.

For example, you know that Ottawa is the capital of Canada (you did know that right?). That’s part of your semantic memory. But I’m guessing that you can’t remember when you learned that (unless you JUST learned that in the last … say … 2 dozen or so words). Remembering the when requires that you encode the specifics of the moment you learned that Ottawa is the capital of Canada - but because you didn’t, you have source amnesia.

I do have to take some exception to the wikipedia article on source amnesia. In that article, they refer to source amnesia as an “explicit memory disorder”. Granted, I haven’t been in grad school for many moons so I’m not (and probably never was) up on the latest on source amnesia, but I’d be hesitant to describe source amnesia as a “disorder”. It’s way too common to be a disorder - it’s almost a natural byproduct of the differences between semantic memory and episodic memory.

And now to bring it full circle with the Curse of Knowledge …

The reason I started thinking about this source amnesia thing in the first place was because it strikes me that the curse of knowledge is somehow related to source amnesia…. Maybe source amnesia falls into a curse of knowledge subset … or maybe it’s the other way around … maybe the curse of knowledge is a symptom or a byproduct of source amnesia.

If you don’t encode the episodic information related to new knowledge it would seem as if you always possessed said knowledge … which would make it hard for you to think back to a time when you didn’t know what you now know (uh oh … I’m getting Rumsfeldian again) and that might make it difficult to sympathize with those who don’t know what you now know.

Hmmm that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. I’ll have to modern jackass that one some more.

A friend “lent” me a copy of the December 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review, in which there was an interesting article about “the curse of knowledge” by Chip and Dan Heath (brothers maybe?). (Unfortunately, I don’t think they have online versions of the HBR without subscription, but you get a copy of the article for $6 at the HBR web site.)

Chip and Dan were arguing that when upper management puts forth vague business strategies and mission statements like “Provide best-of-breed services and products”, they’re not just drinking the kool-aid. They argue that to someone who’s been immersed in the “logic and conventions” of business, those platitudes actually represent a sort of “business shorthand”. To the biz folk, those statements represent vasts amounts of business related knowledge, accumulated over years of b-school and industry experience.

[I supposed that every discipline uses similar shorthand … with designers talking about “envisioning transparent interactivity”, PMs saying stuff like “push back non-critical cycles to open up the critical path”, engineers talking about “shutting down the retention fields to prevent the overloading the Jefferies Tubes”, etc. etc. etc..]

Unfortunately, those business strategies and missions statements have a tendency to come across vague and ambiguous to the rest of us, the ones without all that internalized business acumen.

The problem is further compounded by what’s called “the Curse of Knowledge”. Once you know something, you behave as if you’ve always known it and it’s difficult for you to think like someone who doesn’t know what you know (sounds positively Rumsfeldian).

To illustrate their point, they referred to a 1990 psych study by Elizabeth Newton, then a psych grad student at Stamford. (Unfortunately, the study was included in her non-published dissertation, so it was unable to read the original study. Thanks anyway, Google Scholar.) In her study, Newton divided her participants into two groups, tappers and listeners. Tappers had to tap out a common tune on a table (I imagined them doing this with their fingers or a pencil), listeners had to listen and say which song it was.

Funny thing is I tried this with some friends back when we were kids and it’s incredibly difficult for the listener to pick out a song. Try it with a friend: ask them to identify a tune you’ll tap out, and pick something easy, like Happy Birthday or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

When Newton asked the tappers to predict how often the listeners would guess the song correctly they said that the listeners would get it right about 50% of the time. Since they knew the song they were tapping out, the task seemed incredibly easy for them and they assumed it would be the same for the listeners.

The ACTUAL success ratio was much much smaller. Out of 120 songs, listeners only got 3 right, for a success ratio of 2.5%.

So, back to the biz guy and his grand-yet-incomprehensible-ideas. Chip and Dan argue that there are ways for you to beat the curse of knowledge trap. It’s all rather basic, really. If you’re aware of this curse of knowledge, you’re in a good position to be able to avoid it’s pitfall by translating your ideas back into lay-speak. (Though I guess the challenge would be to do so without coming across as patronizing.)

Chip and Dan suggest using “concrete language” and “stories” to avoid the curse of knowledge and get your point across to other people. Which seems extremely similar to “speak the users language” and “use scenarios and personas” … all things we user research folks try to do with users and designers.

Maybe there’s a market out there for user testing business models and strategies. Damn, maybe I should patent that!