I call BS on that life strategy.

I’m finishing up a MOOC through Coursera, and I have to say that the experience has rekindled an enthusiasm for higher education that I may have lost since I (voluntarily) left my tenure-track position in computer science and math, now almost seventeen years ago.

I have to give credit to Clay Shirky, whose tweet led me in the direction of the topic and course.  The course is A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior, taught by Dan Ariely at Duke University.  The topic fits well into my present interest in understanding and compensating for bias in software testing.

I really lacked the time to do it.  But the course organization is a wonderful combination of freedom to work on your own schedule (I’ve been on business travel three times in the last three weeks), and the structure needed to see it through.  You can fully participate in online hang-outs, wikis, readings, and lectures, do what is necessary to satisfactorily complete the course (this course requires an average score of 85 through all exercises and quizzes), or just pick and choose, depending on your interests and time.

Competitive person that I am, I chose to work toward course completion, while doing little of the extracurricular activities that can add spice to a learning experience.  I still work for a living, after all.

The fact of the matter is that you can live just about anywhere in the world with broadband Internet access, and still experience outstanding educational opportunities, makes the idea of living in a university town less vital to intellectual stimulation.  If you’re looking to a university town in retirement to keep your intellectual edge, you may be shortchanging yourself.

Much of the foundation behind examining how we approach and solve problems comes from Daniel Kahneman’s landmark book Thinking, Fast and Slow.  In the book, Kahneman, who is a psychologist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, defines two types of thinking.  The first is System 1 thinking.  System 1 thinking is a fast, involuntary, and largely instinctive method of thought that enables us to function on a daily basis.  If we sense things in our surroundings such as movement or sounds, our System 1 thinking interprets it instantly and responds if necessary.

System 2 thinking, in contrast, is slow, deliberate, and more considered.  If we’re faced with a situation we haven’t encountered before, or a difficult problem, we engage System 2 thinking and make a more focused decision.  We take the time to think through a problem and come up with what we believe is the best answer or response.

Each has its respective advantages and disadvantages.  System 1 thinking is good enough for most low-risk or immediate decisions, but is too simplistic for more difficult situations.  If we try to make complex decisions without engaging System 2 thinking, we risk making less than optimal decisions due to our own biases or a lack of information at the time a decision is made.

While System 2 thinking is more accurate in complex situations, it takes time to engage and think through a problem.  It’s a conscious process to decide to think more deeply about a situation, and to begin determining how to approach it.  For most simple decisions in our lives, it’s overkill and not timely enough to be useful.  System 2 thinking is also hard work, and can cause decision fatigue if done too often.

As a result, each type of thinking introduces biases into our daily work, which affects how we test and what conclusions we draw from our data.  We may depend too much on System 1 to draw fast conclusions in cases where further thought is needed, or on System 2 so much that we become fatigued and begin to make mistakes because we are mentally tired.

In practice, it’s better to alternate the two types of thinking so as to not overuse either.  If we have complex data to collect and evaluate, it helps if we break up that process with occasional rote activities such as automated regression testing. For example, exploratory testing is a gradual learning process that requires extensive System 2 thinking. In contrast, executing prepared test scripts is largely a rote exercise. Being able to alternate every day or two between the two approaches can keep testers sharp.

In my upcoming posts, I’ll take a closer look at biases that come about as a result of how we think as we approach a problem.  Then I’ll look at how these biased decisions can affect how we test and what we find when we do.

But now there seems to be better reasons to use your supermarket reward card – according to this NBCNews.com article, it may save your life.  Really.

The story goes something like this.  When there is a known food contamination, health officials can see who bought that particular food, and approach those people individually, rather than send out vague alerts that not everyone sees or hears.

Count me as dubious.  This is really a sort of pie-in-the-sky application of Big Data that people can dream up when they picture the potential of the data itself.  It would take weeks to reach all of the buyers of a particular contaminated product, even if you could match all of the different systems and databases together somehow.  By then, the scare would have run its course.

The reality is that such data is stored in hundreds or thousands of different systems, without any means of pulling them together, let alone using it to query on a specific product across millions of purchases.

And then, of course, there are people like me, who still insist on dealing in cash, and remaining somewhat anonymous.  Although they could take my photo in the supermarket, and rather quickly match it up to my other identified photos on the Internet, where I am well known as a speaker and writer.

The idea is intriguing, but it falls into the same tradeoff as many other applications of technology in society today.  We can do things to make ourselves safer, but at the cost of providing more information.  Some don’t seem to have a problem with the latter, but I, in my doddering middle age, do.

Long story short, Shanley is mostly right.  Culture is important.  The older I get, the more I want to be somewhere that shares my values.  We spend an awful lot of time at work (even if I work remotely), and we don’t want to feel like we are alienated during that time.

But one of my values is, well, discomfort.  I want to be exposed to ideas that I haven’t been exposed to before.  I want to think, and re-think, my value proposition, and what I bring to any particular table of effort.  The fact that I was born a white male, in a working class and blue collar community, gives me a particular point of view.  And guess what?  That point of view isn’t shared by the vast majority of people in this world.  And in the grand scheme of things they count; in many cases probably more so than I do at this particular time of my life.

Her point, I think, is that there is a dark underside of the culture story in high tech, and in particular in Silicon Valley.  And it doesn’t boil down to race, or ethnic background, or education, or anything like that.  It means different ideas.  And if we aren’t different, in some fundamental way, we don’t have substantially different ideas.

I was surprised at the negative responses to Shanley’s post, and to subsequent writings on the topic.  Well, maybe not particularly surprised, but certainly disappointed.  If we don’t challenge our thinking, sooner or later we will probably fail, and in a spectacular way.

I think that maybe diversity, at least in high tech companies, isn’t a matter of the color of skin, or race, or anything like that.  The comments that veer off into that realm miss the point in a very real way.  Instead, let me ask this question.  What have you done to make yourself emotionally and intellectually uncomfortable today?  If the answer is nothing, you are almost certainly shortchanging yourself.

I’ve been on both sides of this equation.  Circa 2002, my employer at the time, a major software vendor, summarily fired all of its remote employees (they all received their FedEx packages on the same day) and instilled a strict office policy, claiming that it wanted to instill its unique culture across the company.

The fact that its unique culture was decidedly command and control in the style of the US automotive companies didn’t seem to matter (there is a reason I use that analogy).  To be honest, it was a poor culture at best.  And the fact that it reversed course a few years later has more to do with laziness than belief.

I’ve worked primarily from home since 2006.  Today I work mostly for a small software tools vendor in the Midwest.  There is good in it, and there is challenging.  I make decent money, drive a 15-year old car that accumulates perhaps 4000 miles a year, and I have a commute down two flights of stairs in the morning.

The challenging aspect is that I see the corporate culture from a distance.  Many people wouldn’t pay attention to it, but in my mind it is the key part of being a remote employee.  I have tried my best to fit in, and I think I do so well.  Many of my colleagues bring in snacks on their birthdays; I send a basket of Boston whoopee pies (I’m told they have caused riots).  Overboard?  Perhaps, but most everyone there knows who I am (confession – I don’t know all of them).

I appreciate the flexibility, but I try very hard to give the appearance of the guy in the next cubicle.  I think I’ve largely succeeded, and seem to be well-liked and mostly appreciated.

Of course, I do the work.  That’s really the least of it, and the part I think trips up at least some remote workers.  The biggest issue is fitting in, and being visible.  You can’t hide under the desk.  Culture is very important, and a remote worker has to do both the work and the culture to be successful.

Yahoo will likely reverse course at some point, but gradually and quietly.  Unless it perceived it had a big problem, it would not have taken this step.  But for those who understand and follow the culture, this too shall pass.

But my problem was that the phone stopped making or accepting calls at all.  Instead, I got a message indicating that the phone was tethered to no network.  Almost three hours on technical support over two days with US Cellular led to a belief on their part that it was due to a switch on a nearby Sprint network.  I was asked on multiple occasions how long I had been outside of the local coverage area (not at all).

I finally hoped that a new phone would solve my problem.  The salesman at the local US Cellular store took one look at my Merge and said that it was a problem with the phone; specifically that the antenna wasn’t working properly.  I came away half an hour later with a new Motorola Electrify 2, running Ice Cream Sandwich.  It works so much better, it’s not even funny.

There are a few things that I learned here.  First, don’t trust technical support, even if they sound like they know what your problem is.  Try to confirm independently.  Had I not contacted a separate support group through Twitter who offered me different advice, it would not have occurred to me to get a new phone.

Second, if things with your gadget or software don’t seem right, they probably aren’t.  In retrospect, the old phone never worked properly within my local coverage area, and I should have recognized that.  I was fooled into thinking that roaming was my normal mode of operation, because it is when I travel, and even when at home I’m at the edge of the local coverage area.

Last, don’t accept substandard performance from your gadgets.  They are better than that today.

Now, before we dismiss it out of hand, it’s worthwhile noting that we don’t tax nearly as much commerce as we used to, both because of its online nature and because digital products can be seamlessly sourced in low-tax havens. Our tax base is shrinking, and those who are paying are paying proportionally more.

And this proposal makes the intriguing point that we aren’t taxing free labor, such as crowdsourcing. When we provide personal data to Facebook or LinkedIn, we are giving something up that those companies are reselling in some manner.

Nicolas Colin, the official, calls it a privacy tax, presumably because it is used to compensate society on our collective loss of privacy in the process of doing work for companies, or for providing them with our personal data.

While I prefer to be minimally taxed, and subscribe to a minor degree the idea that our collective tax dollars fund some absurd things (the absurdity of which is different for each of us), the fact is that we as a society depend a great deal on the commons, and the expense of that commons needs to be in some way shared. I decline to get into the debate on “fair share”; what is fair to one may not seem so fair to another. And I decline to get into a debate on what it takes to fund that commons. But as we have migrated into a more digital world, government in general hasn’t kept up, and our concept of how to collect taxes from those changes is still rooted in ideas from 50 or more years ago.

But where do you draw the line? When a company relies on crowdsourcing for testing a product or concept, they are clearly using the labor of the commons, even though we can choose whether or not to participate. When a company resells our freely-provided personal data, haven’t they obtained a profit without paying for the raw material?

But then it can become still more gray. When I book my flights and hotel for my various and sundry travels, I am surely doing the work that a travel agent or customer service representative used to. That was labor at one time; if I am doing it for myself, does it make it less so? Should the airline and hotel be taxed for using my labor for free, when in the past they paid their own?

Society changes. This proposal sounds like an idea that is rooted in past thinking and practices that seem to make little sense moving forward. But paying for the commons needs to get with the times. The complexity and bureaucracy inherent in a VAT scares me, so something different is called for. I applaud ideas like this, even though this particular one is highly flawed.

The latter, of course, was my biggest concern about Kindle and Amazon, and it’s been over a year, and I’m seeing an increasing number of sites (I mean you, Gutenberg Project) making out-of-copyright books available in the format for free download.

I have a Barnes and Noble superstore down the street, and while I don’t browse that much anymore, there is a certain comfort in knowing that I still can.

But more and more interesting books are coming out in electronic, rather than paper form.  And more and more are coming out on the Kindle first, and ePub later, if at all.  I have already bought one book that is only available on a Kindle, and am considering two others.

I suppose I can get a tablet, and use the Kindle reader.  For the Kindle books I have bought so far, that’s what I do, on my laptop.  But I’m unready to commit to a tablet, wanting to see a little more maturity in the market before I make a selection (it probably won’t be an iPad; I just can’t see buying into the Apple ecosystem).

But I fear that this trend portends larger issues for Nook, and Barnes and Noble in general.  Authors are increasingly going to ebook formats only.  That’s a good thing, because it’s increasingly difficult to get a paper book published without going the self-publishing route.  There is nothing inherently wrong with self-publishing, but it does mean that authors are also their own marketers and publicists, which most would prefer not to do.

For those who are seeking an inexpensive way of getting interesting work out to a small audience, the ebook is a natural.  But there is a cost and time commitment to place an ebook in multiple formats on multiple reading platforms.  Some authors prefer supporting a single platform only.  Given that Amazon and Kindle have the majority of sales and readers (65 percent?  I’ve heard various figures that give about two-thirds to Amazon, slightly less than 30 percent to Nook, and a smattering elsewhere.), authors want their works to reach that majority.

As more individual authors make the decision to support the most popular platform, more readers will move to that platform.  There will always likely be a place for an alternative, but the best and most interesting work will appear on Kindle, and readers will follow them.