Abstraction » General mutterings

Top five reasons Singapore has the best airport in the world

ChrisHoover — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:23:59 +0000

I travel to Southeast Asia on business every so often. If I have a choice, I’ll always connect through Changi airport in Singapore.

There are lots of nice things about the airport; it’s got a nice transit hotel, a gym, amazing shops, and reasonable food. But there are some things that set it apart. Top five reasons I love Singapore’s Changi Airport:

Reason Five: It’s got some beautiful areas. Here’s the orchid garden, which surrounds a koi pond complete with dabbling brook, nice wooden bridge and huge voracious koi. To give you an idea of how big this “meditation area” is, the woman at the left of the photo is sitting at the edge of the koi pond with her feet dangling above the water:

Reason Four: Free video games and free WiFi(!) throughout the airport. Lots of geeky types congregating in the XBox area, so of course I didn’t stay long.

Reason Three: The bizarro Asian soda you can get at the airport 7–11. Note that the Bird’s Nest Drink by Super brand features “The Best Good Taste,” as opposed to the inferior good taste offered by other, lesser, Bird’s Nest Drink distributors.

Reason Two: Free Movies, playing 24 hours a day in a real theater. “It’s Pat” was playing when I took this picture. Had I stuck around, I could have caught “First Blood” followed by “Porky’s.”

And the number one reason Changi is the best airport in the world:

Here’s the kicker: when I took this picture, there was no one monitoring the whiskey tasting station. Just a bunch a booze and a stack of paper cups. I’m not kidding.

On being a sloppy nobody in business class

ChrisHoover — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:52:28 +0000

David Sedaris is hilarious, and he had a fantastic essay on air travel in the New Yorker recently. I particularly liked this passage, about traveling in business class. It so perfectly parallels my experience:

“May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris?” the woman looking after me asked—this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the looks I give when the door of a limousine opens. You always expect to see a movie star, or, at the very least, someone better dressed than you, but time and time again it’s just a sloppy nobody. Thus the look, which translates to “Fuck you, Sloppy Nobody, for making me turn my head.”

I feel exactly that way whether I’m in coach (most of the time) or business (the occasional upgrade). Walking to my coach seat I’m always thinking about how much more comfortable these slobs in business are going to be for the next 12 hours or so, damn them. Likewise, I feel a vague sense of guilt if I’m sitting in my business class seat. I’m thinking “this trip is going to suck *so much more* for all of you.” Certainly it doesn’t help that I epitomize the sloppy nobody as I sit there in my fleece listening to an iPod while other business travelers whisper importantly into their Blackberrys.

American Idiot

ChrisHoover — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:11:04 +0000

Concern over the stupidity of the average American has been a theme of intellectual pundits throughout my life, finding an initial voice in the early 60s with Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Since then media attention to the subject has ebbed and flowed over the years. During the early 80’s, when I was in high school, I heard constantly about the fantastic levels of moronism achieved by my peers, many of whom, it was said, struggled to find the United States on an unmarked map. Japan was opening mocking our engineering ability, and America’s competitive position seemed to sink along with our math and science scores.

For my part, I had never (to my knowledge) met someone that couldn’t identify major countries on a map; I thought it would be interesting, in a slowing-down-to-look-at-a-car-wreck kind of way, to speak with someone so fantastically stupid. In some way, I expected such a person to consider their ignorance an aspect of their personality: “I’m Sam, and I play the guitar, and I can’t find the United Kingdom on a map or describe the importance of the first amendment.”

Sadly, stupid people don’t often self-identify with their stupidity, and I never got the chance to meet my representative moron. Turns out I didn’t need to, as the election of George W. Bush and the political rise of evangelical Christianity has put a good number of them on the world stage, free to be gawked at. The election also ushered in a new cycle of intellectual hand-wringing, which has risen in pitch as the gang of Idiots seek to ensure the country is well and truly ruined before they leave office and go back to their homes and their churches.

The latest furlow: last week Susan Jacoby’s “Age of American Unreason” was released. If the review at Salon is any indication (I’ve yet to read it myself), I will probably think it’s a great book, because I’ll strongly agree with it:

The chief manifestations of this newly virulent irrationality are the rise of fundamentalist religion and the flourishing of junk science and other forms of what Jacoby calls “junk thought.” The mentally enfeebled American public can now be easily manipulated by flimsy symbolism, whether it’s George W. Bush’s bumbling, accented speaking style (labeling him as a “regular guy” despite his highly privileged background) or the successful campaign by right-wing ideologues to smear liberals as snooty “elites.”

Unable to grasp even the basic principles of statistics or the scientific method, Americans gullibly buy into a cornucopia of bogus notions, from recovered memory syndrome to intelligent design to the anti-vaccination movement.

Ms. Jacoby also has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post:

It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980.

Truth be told, I’ve myself accepted “elitist” as a pejorative, one that I use almost unconsciously in a self-deprecating way. The main culprit, according to Jacoby, is the rise of video culture and correlated decline of reading

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Not that Jacoby’s effort matters. As Laura Miller describes in her Salon review, she is only preaching to the choir. I’ll buy her book (I’ll even read it), but it’s really an exercise in narcissism in the sense that I know the book will just reinforce my own opionions. Just think: I’ll be even more elitist.

This I believe (or, damn I’m a shallow, shallow little man)

ChrisHoover — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 13:19:56 +0000

This quarter’s topic at the Silicon Valley Junto is “This I believe,” a theme borrowed from the recently-reinstated NPR program. “This I Believe” was originally produced in the 50s by Edward R. Murrow, and was wildly popular in its day. A book of transcripts of essays from the program was a huge best seller. Because Murrow refused to support the show with commercials, he was able to include many scandalous essays on the program that would otherwise never air because frightened sponsors would kill it. One of these was an Eleanor Roosevelt essay in which she admitted to doubts regarding the existence of God (if I remember correctly, her gist was that it’s more appropriate to focus on solving worldly problems rather than perservating on post-death access to a gated community with lots of gilding and de rigeur facial hair). But I digress.

Anyway, I’m out of town and won’t be able to participate in the Junto, but it made me think. What would I write? What, exactly, do I “believe?” It’s a deceptively difficult question, at least for me. Certainly there are things that I think are true, but I find it difficult to boil these ideas down into one that captures me. Something that I can point to and say, “this is what I’m about.”

The trouble is that the things I believe are either trite (I believe my employer should provide me with all the free Diet Coke I can drink) or are pretentious (who the hell cares what I believe politically or religiously or whatever). Then there’s the temptation to write about things I “believe” that are really about trying to establish myself as a good person. “I believe in treating people equally and with kindness” is abstractly true, but the true-truth is I’m often a grumpy asshole for no good reason. And don’t get judgmental about that, mother fucker, because you can be an asshole sometimes too.

I imagine this all has to do with the depth of thought one puts into things. That is, the depth of one’s thinking about an issue is proportional to the importance one places on the issue. It’s disconcerting to be faced with one’s shallowness.

Stop obsessing and just choose, for crying out loud

ChrisHoover — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:24:44 +0000

I was talking with a friend the other day in a local Blockbuster. He commented that 7-11 stores used to rent movies, and that he missed having that option. “With 7-11, there were, like, five movies to choose from. It was really easy to decide which of the five I wanted to rent — I always made a choice. At Blockbuster, there are a million movies. I walk in here, and I can’t decide.”

This reminded me of one of my favorites concepts; the notion of the tyranny of choice. For some people, living as a privileged person in a place with plenty of everything is psychologically damaging. Having options can make you unhappy.

At the core of this is the observation that people can be measured by the extent to which they are “maximizers;” that is, to the extent to which they carefully analyze their decisions in an effort to find the very best option. When making a decision, maximizers weigh every option carefully, taking time to consider the very best possible choice.

The trouble with being a maximizer, it turns out, is that the “best possible choice” does not exist independent of a person’s mind. There is no car that is innately “best,” just as there is no “best” entree, shoes, vacation spot, or anything else. In the end, the best choice is the one that makes you feel the best having chosen it. And there’s the rub.

When you choose to go in a particular direction, you are simultaneously choosing against going in another direction. More to the point, you are choosing against many different directions. Having carefully studied those options, the maximizer is intimately familiar with all of the wonderful qualities he just rejected. This creates a two-fold burden for the poor maximizer: the pain of losing all the options now rejected, and the quickly diminishing joy found in the choice actually made.

Consider the person obsessed with buying a new car. Once chosen and bought, the new car quickly loses its patina. It become mundane and hum-drum with familiarity. In the meantime, all the various lost features offered by the dozen cars rejected float in the (now depressed) maximizer’s mind. Compounding this pain is the amount of energy put into the choosing process; after pouring energy into finding just the right option, it doesn’t feel very good.

The situation isn’t just anecdotal or an interesting thought experiment, there’s lots of evidence that too many options cause real suffering. From the sciam article linked to above:

Assessments of well-being by various social scientists–among them, David G. Myers of Hope College and Robert E. Lane of Yale University–reveal that increased choice and increased affluence have, in fact, been accompanied by decreased well-being in the U.S. and most other affluent societies.

Opposite the maximizer is the satisficer (a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice), someone that chooses the option offered that’s good enough, without obsessing about whether the choice is the best possible. This doesn’t mean that satisficers settle for low quality, nor does it mean that they don’t care. It means they don’t obsess — and often, when considering the cost of an obsessive decision-making process, a satisficing choice is near-best anyway in terms of overall cost.

The moral? Pay attention to your decision making process and notice if you tend to struggle or obsess. If you do, force yourself to say “Screw it, I’ll take the middle one” (or whatever other method that quickly identifies the good-enough option). You’ll be happy that you did. And never spend more than five minutes searching for a movie in a blockbuster.

Brainstorming doesn’t work

ChrisHoover — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:36:53 +0000

Every so often I learn something that challenges something I’ve (almost always unconsciously) held as a fundamental truth. For me, it was a fundamental truth that group activities such as brainstorming are more effective than individual efforts in creative exploration of an issue.

I’m sure the “fundamentalness” of this truth is largely due to the ubiquity of group think in business. People constantly have meetings, and brainstorm, and attempt to arrive at consensus. But it turns out that brainstorming is not only unproductive, it’s very unproductive:

There are a number of explanations for productivity loss in brainstorming groups. Participants may be unwilling to state some of their ideas because they are afraid of being negatively evaluated. Social loafing or free-riding may occur because individuals do not feel accountable or feel their efforts are not needed by the group. Production blocking may result because individuals cannot express their ideas when someone else is talking. Evaluation apprehension, free-riding, and production blocking insure that interactive groups start off rather slowly in the idea-generation process. By means of social comparison processes and a tendency toward downward comparison, this low level of performance may become normative and be maintained throughout the group session or in subsequent sessions even when evaluation apprehension or production blocking may no longer be a problem.

What’s really amazing about this isn’t that brainstorming has been shown as ineffective per se, but that brainstorming remains ubiquitous even through there is so much research about its ineffectiveness (just check out the references section in the paper quoted above). Research that goes back decades. And it’s not just a matter of the research being poorly understood: It turns out that people fully aware of the research (such as psychologists) continue to brainstorm anyway.

The answer, I believe, is that people are fundamentally social: the hard-wired drive to work together as a team is much more powerful than an intellectual knowledge that group-think has many pitfalls. There are techniques designed to overcome the limitations of brainstorming, however; the most popular of which seems to be the unfortunately-named brainwriting.

Brainwriting boils down to brainstorming using written notes instead of speaking, thus creating a kind of anonymity designed to overcome the various social obstacles that limit truly creative thinking. It strikes me that participants in such an exercise are likely to fall victim to Penny Arcade’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, to wit: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

So, brainstorming doesn’t work, but we can’t stop doing it, and using alternative techniques just highlights the assholes in the group. What does this mean? I dunno. Perhaps despair is in order.

Get Human: How to call an actual person at any corporation

ChrisHoover — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:36:04 +0000

I am endlessly frustrated by navigating through automated customer service messages. The absolute worst are the voice interaction messages, to which you are supposed to speak your request (instead of pressing “1” or whatever).

The problem is, I’m usually in a car, or at the airport, or in some other similarly noisy place. the stupid machine can’t understand me above the ambient noise. I’m amazed at how irritating this is. It’d be less irritating to just whack me in the head with the phone.

Phone: Welcome to AlwaysLate Airlines. Just speak your request, or say “Help” for a list of available options.

Me: Flight status