The Crowdsourced Looking Glass

Posted on March 22, 2010 Written by 16 Comments

We don’t really need a Reason to Be, but it certainly helps to occasionally step back and look at a larger picture.

What is Occam’s RazR?

What do I want it to be?

It’s not what we saw from the first incarnation of the “personal weblog.” I don’t share everything here. I have Facebook, and a Twitter account that I use for short thoughts. (I even started a “My Quotes” category to archive the witty pieces that shouldn’t be so ephemeral.)

I have a Posterous site, “Ike’s Online Scraptacular,” for the pieces that don’t fit in other places.

I occasionally contribute at Media Bullseye and Calling John Galt, so as not to litter this space with thoughts in niches.

So if I am segmenting my online output, what goes here?

Bucket needs a label

I suppose I need to refocus and answer that.

Or I can take the lazy way out and say “It’s whatever the heck I want it to be about, on any given day.” But that doesn’t help the reader develop a consistent expectation. And even if I don’t have a purpose for this audience, it doesn’t mean I ought to waste its time with scattered meanderings.

So, this is what I will try to live up to:

  • Occam’s RazR will be a site about exploration and explanation.
  • Occam’s RazR will be a site about communication and cognition.
  • I want to write about thinking, and how we can strip away assumptions to arrive at truth.
  • I want to write about writing, and how we can more clearly enunciate what we mean.
  • I want to write about process, and how we delineate what we can understand from what we can’t.
  • I may write about football, or politics, or economics, or television, or any of a host of topics that might seem to emerge from nowhere. But I will always aim for the spirit of revealing the hidden truth, the missing link or the unsupported assumption.
  • I will do my best to bridge from knowns to unknowns.

What am I missing?

I know I am missing elements, but I want them to be explicit and not implicit.

I worked for a news manager once who got a lot of mileage out of sending me to places where news was happening, with the gameplan of “Send Ike there, and let Ike be Ike.”

That’s not enough. I want the outsiders’ perspective of what that means.

So tell me…

Filed Under: Personal Tagged: , ,

Less is More on Facebook

Posted on September 11, 2009 Written by 3 Comments

More than a few people have commented about the new Facebook Lite interface. I will simply add the impressions from a co-worker of mine who is blind.

I suggested it to her this morning as we were discussing social networking, and how difficult some of the navigation can be. I had a hunch that the Lite interface – being more streamlined and less AJAX-y – would make it easier for her to get to the information she wanted.

She says the Chat function is gone, but that’s not a huge loss for her since the main Chat interface doesn’t give her any information about who is or is not online. She says she will revert to the main page if she needs Chat, but is bookmarking the Lite Facebook for everyday use.

POSTSCRIPT: My coworker is a little disturbed to find out that her sighted friends have a way to hide YoVille, Mobsters 2 and Castle Age requests… and she doesn’t.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged: ,

The Dream Job

Posted on August 22, 2008 Written by 11 Comments
dream-job-venn

When I was interviewing for my current job, I was asked why I wanted it.  True, everyone loves getting a paycheck (and some even love being employed.)  But my answer came back to the intersection of things I enjoyed.  I actually traced the following diagram on my desk for the interview committee:

These are three things I truly enjoy:  helping people tell their story in times of stress and strain; geeky tech tools; and teaching others.  The real actualization comes when those spheres start overlapping.  My experience with using New Media tools to communicate during disasters comes in an intersection.  Likewise my media training, and even the time I spend on Twitter and elsewhere helping others “get” Social Media.

I’m lucky to have a job that allows me to play in the mixed colors, and even work in that bright white zone in the middle.

Have you ever mapped out your motivations in this way?  There might just be some fulfilling intersections that you’re missing because you haven’t tried overlapping…

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, motivation, Venn, career[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication, Philosophy Tagged: ,

Unplanned Outage

Posted on August 6, 2008 Written by 1 Comment

No mysterious disappearances.  I’m just swamped.  I’ve got more ideas than I know what to do with, and no time to flesh them out.  Some are doozies.  And I have had a ball commenting in various places.

Also, things have been a bit slow on the home front, as my 5-year-old PC is showing her age.  Sluggish boots, slogging through media, and not enough horsepower to round the next turn.  Add our new digital camera with uberpixel technology, and our hard drives are hard pressed to keep up.  Not enough slack in them for a defrag.

The replacement has already shipped, which means I might be more efficient in my home use and actually put some skin on the skeletal posts.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged: ,

Too Simple

Posted on July 3, 2008 Written by 5 Comments

If there is a unifying there here, it’s in explaining the seemingly complex in the most simple way possible.  Occam’s Razor is a means of comparing multiple explanations or theories, with the notion that the simplest is likely the truth.  However, many people are guiding themselves by the fallacy that the simplest explanation is the truth.

The factor that’s missed is the first part of Occam’s Razor, that the theories to be compared are equally sound.  Theories are tested by evidence and experiment, and by their ability to predict the future.  The theory that Atlas is holding up the Earth on his shoulders and standing on the back of a giant tortise is certainly easier to envision than warping of space/time and explaining the math of gravity — but it’s not going to help you calculate orbits.

These thoughts come to mind as I revisit yesterday’s item about Starbucks and the economy.  Many people want to believe the world is a simple place.  If Starbucks is losing jobs, then there are fewer jobs in the retail coffee industry.  If someone is getting rich, then others must be getting poor.  If prices are going up, then someone is being unfair.

Deep down, we all crave simplicity.  The less we have to think, the more we can create and imagine and think about the things we want to.  The danger comes when we paint too simple a picture for ourselves, and end up with a working model of our universe that is flawed.  If someone believes that the rich get richer only by making poor people poorer, and that the only way to get wealth is to inherit it, then that individual will be less likely to engage in the behaviors that would lead to wealth accumulation.  A simple worldview can cloud reality — and in this instance becomes a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sometimes it’s okay to shave some edges off the models we use because we don’t need the level of detail the extra work would require.  When the additional complexity isn’t worth the potential reward, then by all means ditch it.  Just be careful about applying your template to other people, as they may have a need for a greater or lesser degree of detail in their results and their reality.

What are some of your pet-peeve oversimplifications?

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Occam’s Razor, philosophy, science, theory, economics[/tags]

Filed Under: Philosophy Tagged:

Ugly and Rough

Posted on April 21, 2008 Written by 3 Comments
shopping-cart

“Ugly” and “rough” – at least in the English language – sound sort of like they are. They certainly don’t roll off the tongue like “pretty” and “smooth.” There’s a whole chicken-and-egg argument that we could make about whether ugly-sounding words describe ugly things, or if we associate the ugliness of a word to that sound because of its meaning.

But that’s for another day.

This is really a brief thought about the value of the Ugly and the Rough.

Walmart Wins with Rough

I know this may seem like an alien concept to many of you, but there are many Walmarts at which I might shop depending upon where in the metro area I am. And I’ve noticed something peculiar in each of them: from the time you get in the front lobby to the time you enter the actual store, the floors have all been replaced with a textured, stone-like surface. It looks very nice and stylish, and even somewhat trendy. And it’s now in all the stores where I happen to be.

It also aggravates me, because it happens to be in that area where the shopping carts are stored. Because of the rough floor, by the time I get into the main part of the store I can’t tell if there is a bad wheel on the cart, or if the cart is going to squeal or drift. By the time I figure out that I have a bad cart, it’s usually more of a bother to go back than it is to live with the annoyance. And that, my friends, is human engineering at its most scientific.

If the floors were smooth, I’d be able to test my cart right there on the spot, and if it was a lemon I could move to the next cart in the stack. And so would you (if you shopped at Walmart.) And so would everyone else. And the carts would all be scattered, and there would be a traffic jam as the picky and the persnickety all jockeyed for the Golden Cart that holds the magic ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory. The expensive new flooring actually serves a hidden purpose — to keep people moving into the store.

Google Wins with Ugly

GoogleHave you been to Google.com lately? Don’t bother clicking over on my account. Aside from occasionally changing the cartoony image in the logo, it’s pretty much the same. A simple white page with a search box a third of the way down in the center. No glitz, no glamor, no videos in your face. Google is flat-out ugly. Because of the ugly and simple, it also loads very quickly, meaning a massive cost savings in terms of bandwidth and time. Given the number of searches processed, adding an additional quarter-of-a-second to the pageload times would be a lot of time wasted for end-users.

Yahoo!How much more popular would Yahoo! Search be if the search experience weren’t so noisy? Granted, Yahoo! has always been more interested in being a portal, but Google lets you have a portal page too. It just doesn’t jam it in your face. When I want to search for something quickly, I don’t want stock quotes, headlines, the weather, links to my mail, and a giant banner ad for my credit score. When I want the portal, I’ll go to the portal. When I want to search, I want a search. Ugly and simple wins.

My Experience

I’ve been very grateful for those of you who enjoy this site enough to subscribe. For the longest time, there was a slow linear progression of the subscriber base. That slope got steeper the day I added those big ugly orange subscription buttons to my sidebar. I had a couple of people tell me they were ugly and had to go. Yet the previous ones were too small, the colors didn’t stand out, and too far down the page to attract attention. For most people, the buttons appear on the site with no scrolling necessary.

Yes, they are ugly. Yes, they break the color theme. Yes, they eat up valuable real-estate. And yes, they work. They’ve helped me connect with more people, by encouraging them to consume these words at the time and place of their own convenience, not mine. (Tired of seeing those buttons? Peruse Occam’s RazR in an RSS reader, and tell the Subscription Monsters to be gone.)

Ugly and Rough are ugly and rough… but at times are elegantly effective.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Google, Yahoo, Walmart, user experience, web design[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication, Language, Marketing Tagged:

Making Pearls

Posted on March 31, 2008 Written by Leave a Comment

In the last couple of years with the Red Cross, I have been involved in some of the strangest crisis communications challenges you can imagine. Notice, I didn’t say “most intense” or “most difficult” or even “most noteworthy.” In most of these cases, we’re talking about a local chapter and its relationship to its community.

You wouldn’t know about it unless it were going on in your backyard — and if I am doing my job, it won’t be on your radar even then.

While these experiences have certainly been memorable, you won’t find the details here. However, the lessons are all throughout Occam’s RazR. They’re in the My Quotes category, they’re in the Venn diagrams, they’re in the Demotivationals. They are distilled down to their purest essence. They are pearls, not in the sense of self-importance; rather, the sense of being a valuable takeaway from a slimy process.

Enjoy them for what they are — apply them as you see fit — and be happy you didn’t have to learn the lesson the hard way.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, philosophy, education[/tags]

Filed Under: Philosophy Tagged: ,
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