My goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than people on the left.” TL;DR: For practical purposes, it doesn't mean anything. You might guess, from the previous episode , that it's just that personality traits don't predict behavior. That's true, but more interesting things are going on: What does "open to experience" mean, actually ? How much less open are conservatives? Key sources...
Feb 13, 2023•13 min•Ep. 24
It’s hard to predict how personality traits will affect behavior in new situations. We don’t have a good grasp of the difference between a “new situation” and “a variant of an old situation.” Small differences in the situation (like recent good luck) can make a big difference in how traits like “helpfulness” are expressed. So you'll probably need to try it and see ("probe-sense-response"), rather than assume you can find out enough to predict ("sense-analyze-respond"). Summary sources: John M. D...
Jan 30, 2023•28 min•Ep. 23
The key message begins with the observation that categories and concepts have central examples and fuzzy boundaries. The idea that categories are usefully defined by boolean-valued necessary and sufficient conditions is outdated. The stock example is the question: "Is the pope a bachelor?" The answer is, "Well, technically ", but there are clearly more central examples that capture more of the concept's connotations. (See Lakoff's 1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal Ab...
Jan 16, 2023•32 min•Ep. 22
Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991. Note: I'd say this is the least readable of the books I've covered so far, especially if you're allergic to jargon-heavy academic social science. On the plus side, it's only 123 pages (excluding bibliography and index). Étienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 " I sure as hell am not going to share my knowledge here for free! " Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild ...
Jan 02, 2023•23 min•Ep. 21
Julian E. Orr, T alking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job , 1996 Credits Image of a person using a copier via Mr. Domingo .
Dec 22, 2022•32 min•Ep. 20
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , 1998. XKCD, Always try to get data good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it . Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi , 1883. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1961. Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy , The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions , The Russian Revolution Credits Image of a cow being given a physic...
Dec 07, 2022•33 min•Ep. 19
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , 1998. Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of the novels is Something Coming Through . Here's a review . " Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was " is a short story that I think stands alone. I quote from the second Jackaroo no...
Nov 30, 2022•25 min•Ep. 18
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , 1998. The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.dev Credits Satellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons...
Nov 21, 2022•22 min•Ep. 17
Mentioned One of Glenn 's talks on engineering . The first part of Hillel Wayne 's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial , 1969 Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist , 2010 David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, " A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It ", 1986. The Neal Ford talk about constraints was taken down from YouTube because Protecting...
Nov 14, 2022•30 min•Ep. 16
Mark Seemann blog twitter Code That Fits in Your Head , 2021 The books Peter Watts, Blindsight , 2006. Goodreads description . Or: free at the author's site . Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow , 2011 Also mentioned Read Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions , 2006 Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain , 2021 George A. Miller, " The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two ", 1956 Rich Hickey, " Hammock-Driven Development " (video), 2010 Peter Watts, Echopraxia , 2014 Po...
Nov 07, 2022•41 min•Ep. 15
DDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value , 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years , 2011 David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity , 2021 Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows' Aimi Hussein and Racheal Bryant, " The secret life of cows: Social behavior in dairy herds " (PDF) Ian Welsh, " The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred " Paul Feyerabend and Bert Terpstra (editor), Conqu...
Nov 03, 2022•26 min•Ep. 14
David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value , 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years , 2011 People mentioned Einar W. Høst...
Oct 31, 2022•26 min•Ep. 14
David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value , 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years , 2011 Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere" , 1998-2000 Credits Picture of a Kula ring gift item , Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons...
Oct 17, 2022•23 min•Ep. 13
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 The 1968 Software Engineering Conferenc e An objection to the trading zone Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities , 2002. Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere" , 1998-2000 Credits Roulette wheel image from Flickr user k-bot , CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ....
Oct 10, 2022•16 min•Ep. 12
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 Wikipedia on academic genealogy @made_in_cosmos had a tweet about tradition that I mentioned Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth , 1998 Context-driven testing website and book The Agile Fusion workshop description People mentioned: Lisa Crispin , Ward Cunningham , Janet Gregory , GeePaw Hill , Simon Peyton-Jones Credits An image from an undated review ...
Oct 06, 2022•14 min•Ep. 11
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 1962 Steven Law, "Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception?" , 2018. (Also has a picture of the Necker cube, which Kuhn also uses. Come to think of it, it might be he only uses the Necker cube, not the rabbit/duck.) Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge , 1970. (The proceedings of a 1965 conference on Kuhn's i...
Oct 03, 2022•9 min•Ep. 10
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 Credits Roman coin depicting the harbor at Ostia, from the title page of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century , translated by Wilfred H. Schoff, 1912. Source unknown, but the entire book is public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons ....
Sep 26, 2022•20 min•Ep. 9
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 Brian Marick, An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming , unfinished Brian Marick, Lenses for the Mere Mortal: Purescript Edition , unfinished Programming languages: Clojure , ClojureScript , Elixir , Elm , Purescript Credits Photo of proton-antiproton collision from UA5 collaboration, CERN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons....
Sep 19, 2022•27 min•Ep. 8
Lakatos in a nutshell Scientists join research programmes. Research programmes are characterized by a small hard core of 2-5 postulates that guide development of theories and experiments. The hard core is not questioned from within the research programme. To be progressive , a research program must produce a series of dramatic ("novel") predictions that are confirmed by experiment . This is in contrast to the mainstream account of science, which emphasizes that it's rational to believe in a theo...
Sep 12, 2022•21 min•Ep. 7
James Shore: website , The Art of Agile Development , AOAD book club , twitter Mentioned Susan Leigh Star, This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept , 2010 Jeff Patton: website , story mapping articles , story mapping book , twitter Gojko Adzic: website , book on impact mapping , impact mapping website , twitter Diana Larson: website , twitter Alistair Cockburn: website , twitter Jessica Kerr: website , twitter , symmathesy Michael Feathers: website , twitter Miro col...
Sep 05, 2022•40 min•Ep. 6
Guests Elisabeth Hendrickson, @testobsessed , Curious Duck Digital Laboratory Chris McMahon, @chris_mcmahon , blog Citations Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer , Joan Fujimura, 1997. Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing , Elisabeth Hendrickson, 2012....
Aug 29, 2022•35 min•Ep. 5
Citations Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer , Joan Fujimura, 1997. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , Richard Rorty, 1989. Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns , Kent Beck, 1996. Ward Cunningham on "working the program" , 2004. The Mathematical Experience , Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, 1980. "Elephant Talk", King Crimson, 1981 (audio). "Hammock-Driven Development" , Rich Hickey, 2010 (video). "What is Hammock-Driven Development?" , Keagan Stokoe, 2021 C...
Aug 22, 2022•23 min•Ep. 4
Recombinant DNA ("gene splicing") was a wildly successful technology in the world of cell biology. Its success gave credibility to the associated "proto-oncogene theory of cancer." The theory piggy-backed on the tool. jUnit was a fairly successful tool in the world of Java programmers. But it was not as successful as recombinant DNA, and it was fairly unsuccessful at promoting its associated theory of test-driven design. This episode looks at what (according to Joan Fujimura's ideas about the hi...
Aug 15, 2022•22 min•Ep. 3
When TDD arrived on the software scene around 1980, it became popular very fast. Why did it succeed so well? I think it's because it was a combined theory and technology that hit the same "sweet spot" of intellectual infectiousness that the "proto-oncogene theory of cancer" did in the 1980's. Most of this episode is a history of the proto-oncogene theory. The next episode will look at case studies in software. Sources: Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer , Jo...
Aug 08, 2022•20 min•Ep. 2
The episode builds from the paper “ Institutional Ecology, 'Translations', and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939 ”. It contains a brief history of how biology was changing around 1907, how scientists and collectors collaborated using "boundary objects", and how acceptance tests can be seen as boundary objects. It ends with some heretical thoughts about business alignment. Later: preparing for episode 21, I found that Étienne Wenger...
Jul 19, 2022•21 min•Ep. 1
