Brain Dumps

"Crab Mentality" and Internet Drama

[EDIT: This isn’t an in-depth look at “crab mentality” so I changed the title. The real in-depth look at the term is here.]

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Yay, they finally said who they were. (Spoiler: it’s DDB)

Issue resolved too quickly for your taste? Here’s another lulz-y issue. :D

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One of the common annoying things about the past few blogosphere-buzzes-of-the-week is when people use the term “crab mentality” to defend the target of the issue.

It’s just… well.. feels wrong to use them in those instances.

Take for example the (I’m not naming names here :P ) one about the teenage girls who arrogantly maul the English language without even knowing it or the one about the high class people who arrogantly maul the intelligence of those who witness their… whatever. We aren’t laughing at them because we are insecure that we are not as popular or [insert positive trait here] as them so we want to drag them down. It’s simply because there’s something really funny about what they’re doing and they should be able to take the hint. I’d admit, some of the insults are going too far, but if you really know what you’re doing, you should at least know that striking back with something as pathetic as “crab mentality” won’t go anywhere.

Or that judging fiasco/drama. I won’t say much about the issue because, like /b/-tards, white knights are everywhere and nakakatamad mag-delete ng mga walang kwentang comment. I’ll just say that the “crab mentality” attack is directed to the wrong people.

And now the Ako Mismo. No, we’re not scrutinizing the privacy policy and questioning the amount of sensitive information needed by the site because we are selfish bastards who don’t want the country to get out of its current state. We’re just concerned about identity theft. You know, the one where people can pose as you and steal all your money because they know your private information? Oh wait, you’re not working for the food on your family’s plate so I guess you can’t understand what’s in stake here.

The only issue wherein “crab mentality” makes sense is the The Great Book Blockade of 2009, and even the scope of that issue isn’t that clear yet.

The lesson here?

Kids these days are more pathetic at flame wars than back when we were pathetic kids.

Ako Mismo and Plurk Search

I’m taking a break from all this SE/Management idea bashing to move on to another type idea bashing. :D

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The blogosphere-buzz-of-the-week for this week is about Ako Mismo (I myself in Tagalog) an advocacy campaign urging people to pledge something for the country. A lot of people have seen their commercials due to the Hatton/Pacquiao match last Sunday.

As expected from people living in one of the most corrupt countries in the world and looking for any slivers of hope they can find, a lot of people signed up. Obviously, some of them are bloggers. However, as expected from people living in such a country, some people need to wait and see if the campaign is not corrupt itself before signing up. Again, some of these people are bloggers too (including Martin, a classmate back in grade school whose blog name coincides with the campaign name, effectively putting him on top of Google’s results :D ). One of the more critical and popular blog posts about Ako Mismo is from a forwarded email to Gang Badoy, founder of another advocacy group Rock Ed.

As I see it, Ako Mismo’s success will depend on whether the doubt spreads like a wildfire in Plurk and Multiply. This is a one-sided memetic competition — with no spokespersons or avenues to answer criticisms raised against them (at least, as of this writing), Ako Mismo’s only defense against the doubters is the sheer number of people who are ignorant of the criticisms raised against them. If for some reason (because IMHO this is unlikely) the doubt reaches critical mass in the blogosphere before they open avenues other than their website, they will suffer the same fate as Sony did when they tried to use viral marketing three years ago for the PSP.

Coincidentally, Plurk just rolled off their version of real-time search today. IMO, this is one of the “fronts” that can be used by the doubters to spread their thoughts. People will use the search to find info about Ako Mismo. The search result will likely influence the searcher: if the results are purely people talking about the campaign, even if it’s just people wanting a dog tag, the searcher will probably be enticed to sign up. However, if the results are discussions about the authenticity of the goals of the campaign or links to the forwarded email, the searcher will think twice about the campaign and might even re-plurk the links.

The fun part here is that even just a small group of people can influence those search results. :D

I am personally tempted to do so even just to see how many people will use the new search function for Plurk, but I’d prefer to sit this one out.

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My personal thoughts on Ako Mismo below the cut.

Continue reading “Ako Mismo and Plurk Search”

Missing Books in Personal MBA?

I’m sleepy so I’m going to make this short.

Ever wonder why some popular books are missing from the Personal MBA list? For example, both Built to Last and Rich Dad, Poor Dad are international bestsellers and yet they aren’t included in the list.

I don’t really know the exact process on how they choose books in Personal MBA, but I can see why those two types of books aren’t on the list.

Built to Last, In Search of Excellence, Good to Great, and practically every Toyota, Google, Starbucks, or [Insert big company or CEO here] book has been ripped apart by The Halo Effect. While the latter does not really turn all of those books into paperweights, it prevents you from having delusions that reading and following those books alone will turn your company around. (In some cases, THE does turn those books into paperweights, but I think you get the point. :P )

Robert Kiyosaki’s books, on the other hand, have been criticized by financial experts ever since Rich Dad, Poor Dad was released. Probably the most popular criticisms of RDPD in the Internet is John T. Reed’s criticism. I dare you not to be disillusioned about the book after reading that site. :D

As for other books, I think I can safely assume that they either have better alternatives already on the list or the book is still haven’t caught the attention of the PMBA community yet. Either way, if a book is missing on the list, it doesn’t doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not useful. Continuing with the disclaimers, I won’t claim the list as infallible (I see a couple of books that aren’t applicable to our country).

In the end, whether or not you decide to follow the list when buying books, always read the books you buy with both an open and a skeptical mind.

Cargo Cult Thinking

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
— Richard Feynman

Many of the problems shared by business management and software engineering I mentioned in the previous post stem from Cargo Cult Thinking. As mentioned by noted physicist Richard Feynman in his famous speech to CalTech students that even in these modern times, people resort to blindly following how other people do things in the hopes of reaping the same results.

Dr. Feynman used cargo cults to criticize how many scientists fail to follow the scientific method by merely going through the steps of experimentation but not making sure that their process is scientifically sound. The Halo Effect uses cargo cults in the same manner by exposing the mistakes made by best selling management books in their research. The book basically tells the reader to ignore all those pages detailing how the latter conducted its research because no matter how “rigorous” they were conducted, they were never sound to begin with i.e. there were critical flaws in their process from the start.

Cargo cult thinking in the field of software engineering doesn’t even bother with claiming to follow the scientific method. As Steve McConnell writes in his “From the Editor” article in IEEE Software, March/April 2000, some managers are deluded to think that simply following the culture of highly successful companies will result in radical improvements in productivity. On the smaller scale, many novice programmers (and sadly, software teams in general) are deluded to follow cargo cult programming practices without even knowing why they are used successfully by other coders in the first place.

In my opinion, cargo cult thinking isn’t that bad… if only one or two people are affected. As they usually fail in a spectacular fashion, they make the affected people think twice before doing something like that again. If an entire group, or worse, an entire company is blindly following cargo cult thinking… well… either you ramp up your risk management or you start making popcorn for the drama that will unfold. :D

Business Management and SE

Yesterday I was bored and uninspired. To make up for it, I went to Makati today with a simple plan in mind: find a good book and read a couple of chapters over a large cup of green tea latte.

There were a couple of good books in National Bookstore Glorietta 5 and Powerbooks Greenbelt 4, but Fully Booked Greenbelt 5 had both a 20% off on all books and a Starbucks bar(?) inside their store so I ended up with FB. The problem with FB was that they didn’t have the books I wanted to read, How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Millionaire Next Door, both Personal MBA books (with so many flashy business books in bookstores nowadays, that list serves as an easy way to separate the chaff from the wheat).

I was supposed to go for some random “bestseller” business book when I saw hidden in a corner (literally) The Halo Effect. The first thing that popped into my head was:

Personal MBA tells me that this is the only book worth buying here, so I might as well buy it.

And so I picked up the book, and immediately brought it to the counter to pay for it. Then I went over to Starbucks, ordered my latte, and started reading the book. A few chapters later, I was telling myself:

Good thing I trusted Personal MBA.

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The Halo Effect has a simple message, namely, be skeptical about management bestsellers. But the reasons the book presents as well as the implications of the message covers a broad range of issues, and so I can’t talk about all of them in a single post. Now that’s good for me because I have enough material from a single book for at least 5 more posts. :D

Anyway, I won’t be tackling the book’s message in this post. I’ll just talk about something interesting from the first few pages of the book.

Continue reading “Business Management and SE”