Geeks can be hard to work with

Geeks and especially programmers often have strong belief in "doing things right". People have remarked on this tendency, and given it a variety of negative characterisations: obsessive-compulsive, irrational, making a moral issue out of a pragmatic question.

As a geek and a programmer, I put my hands up to this stereotype - it doesn't affect us all, but enough of us (myself included) have some degree of it that I don't think it's inaccurate. However, I believe that far from being a drawback, it's arguably a vital component of a gifted developer.

I think this urge toward technical correctness comes from three main sources:

Obsessive-compulsiveness

Good programmers spend a lot of their time thinking in details - they have to, to be able to write reliable code. Programmers who gloss over or fudge details write buggy code with unhandled and unknown edge-cases.

Importantly, this code usually "sort-of" works most of the time (or at least, the obviously broken bits quickly get patched), and then occasionally fails spectacularly and catastrophically... at which point it's also usually blamed on the programmer who wrote it, rather than the manager who specified an over-complex requirement, or who provided an unreasonably small amount of resources (time, money, manpower) to achieve it.

Being a programmer is 50% artistic and 50% autistic, so it's hardly surprising that programmers can be a bit Aspergers-y about their code, especially when they're likely to carry the can for any catastrophic failures caused by it.

Artistic merit

Any programmer who isn't a journeyman or hack does the job because they like to create things, and as you get better mere creation isn't satisfying - instead you want to create things of beauty.

It's been noted before that (many or most good) programmers are makers - we need to feel that what we're creating reflects our abilities - something we'd be happy to put our name to - and we like delivering good, reliable, flexible, well-designed systems.

Banging out code or design you know is buggy, unreliable, inflexible or has unhandled edge-cases is simply not rewarding in the slightest. It's like hiring an artist to paint a wall blue, or hiring a sprinter to walk slowly to the shops for you.

To be fair, this is a very wishy-washy, non-business-oriented motivation, but I'd go so far as to say pretty much all the best programmers suffer from it - it seems to go with the territory, and not just from programmers, either - chefs are notoriously histrionic, artists are notoriously high-strung about their work and musicians are notoriously unstable or prone to mental illnesses. I don't think you can have excellence without pride in the work, and I don't think you can have pride in work without disillusionment and frustration when you're forced to churn out work you know is crap.

Pragmatism

I've been privately or professionally involved in software development for around 15 years. I've worked in a variety of companies, in a variety of languages and systems, and with a variety of different management styles.

Across all companies, management structures, languages, technologies and system there are only two things I'm utterly certain of:

1. Given the choice between a longer/more expensive design and a simpler, less flexible one, management will almost always say "design it to the current requirements, because we'll never need <hypothetical scenario X>, and it would be a waste of time to build a system which takes it into account".
2. From the date of hearing this, within six months to a year they will discover a pressing, immediate, unavoidable and business-critical need for scenario X... and if they don't react well to being told that this will now take longer to accommodate, they often react really badly to being gently informed this is the result of the decision they took several months previously, at which point you (or your predecessor) informed them that this would be the consequence if they ever encountered scenario X.

Personally I try very hard to avoid taking dogmatic positions on anything, but in the years I've spent programming (especially professionally, when you're most likely to have to compromise on the design or implementation to hit deadlines or budgets), I - literally, with no exaggeration - don't believe I've ever heard "we'll never need that" and then not had to implement it (whatever it was) within a few months of that date.

This only has to happen a few times (especially when you're responsible for cleaning up the mess) before you become firmly convinced that creating a system that's any less flexible than you can possibly manage is ultimately tantamount to just fucking yourself square in the ass.

There are reasons...

So yes - there are a number of reasons why programmers are obsessed with Doing The Right Thing, and why we tend to react with aesthetic revulsion to the idea of fudging designs, or hard-coding things for convenience.

Some of them are unfortunate but understood and accommodated in other disciplines - try commissioning an artist to produce art for your offices then ban him from using anything except potato-prints, or tell an architect (for deadline/budget reasons) to design you a building that they know damn well could fall down at any moment.

Others are actually vital aspects of being a programmer that you can't easily switch on and off - athletes have to be fit, programmers have to be anally-retentive and precise - and that you really wouldn't want to do without in your dev team.

Lastly, if you're a non-technical co-worker or manager, programmers often have a lot more experience working on software projects than you do, and have learned hard-won lessons you aren't even aware are available to learn... particularly lessons where they have to pick up the pieces from their own (or other people's) mistakes.

So yeah, geeks can be hard to work with. But then the guy who knows where the landmines are buried can be awfully prescriptive about where you put your feet as you navigate through a minefield, too. And unless you want your feet blown off, it's often worth listening to them.

The feeling you're about to get smarter

As you might have noticed if you read this blog, I'm quite an aggressive rationalist - I'm big on introspection, and strive to be as rational, consistent and justified in my beliefs as possible. If someone demonstrates to me conclusively that I'm wrong I'll generally (at least: I'll try to) reverse my position on a dime.

Because I try not to invest identity in my opinions it's usually not too difficult to change a belief or position when new information or reasoning comes along. However, even I'll admit that despite my efforts in this area, It's Not Fun Being Wrong.

In particular, everyone hates that point in a discussion that most rational people experience occasionally, where you discover your argument has a gaping hole in it. You know the one - you get that sick, empty, vertiginous, see-sawing feeling where it feels like you've inched yourself out over a long drop because you trusted the plank you were standing on, only to notice now that it was apparently made of cardboard the whole time.

However, I've realised recently, that feeling is exciting and scary, but it should be savoured and sought-after, because it's the feeling you're about to get smarter.

It may feel unpleasant, but that doesn't mean it should be unpleasant - that's much more down to what we associate with the feeling than the feeling itself. For example, a muscular ache is rarely considered pleasant... and yet after a good workout we can even enjoy it. This is because - while the feeling is the same - when we've worked out hard out we often feel virtuous, and good about ourselves. Although our muscles ache, every time we notice it it's a reminder that we did something we think of as good, and that we're slightly fitter or healthier now (or can just eat an extra cream cake without feeling guilty) as a result.

Equally, it's usually unpleasant to have our insides jangled about, or to feel like we're falling, or to be out of control... and yet many people love roller-coasters. It's unpleasant to be frightened... but some people will watch horror movies for fun.

In every case, the important difference is that although the sensation might be unpleasant on its own, we recognise in each case that we're getting something greater out of it, that makes the uncomfortable sensation worth-while - health and fitness, or novelty, or entertainment and feeling more secure the rest of the time. Indeed, when we associate it strongly enough, you can find yourself searching out these unpleasant sensations, and relishing the discomfort because of what it signifies.

"Being wrong" is one such unpleasant sensation, but as pointed out above, it's actually the feeling that you've just become smarter. This is unambiguously a good thing... and yet we generally don't realise or acknowledge to ourselves that that's what's happening, so people often simply fixate on (or even actively, instinctively try to avoid) the unpleasant sensation.

What this means, then, is that as humans we very deeply, subconsciously, instinctively try to stop ourselves from becoming smarter, and we don't even realise we're doing it. Whatever we consciously tell ourselves, subconsciously we would rather feel good about ourselves and be wrong than be correct or rational in our opinions.

As you're reading this blog, I'll assume you're the kind of person who would rather be right (even if it's uncomfortable) than deluded but confident. This, then, is clearly a problem.

What to do about it?

The good news is that - because it's a subconscious association, it's malleable. You can change and modify (even, as we've seen, completely reverse) these associations with a little effort.

Try the following: next time you realise (or someone proves) you're wrong about something, stop and consciously acknowledge it to yourself. Try to hold and really feel that sensation of being wrong. Try to consciously acknowledge and analyse the emotions you're feeling - are you embarrassed? Ashamed? Annoyed? At the other person or yourself? Do you suddenly feel less sure of your place in the world, or your opinions on certain subjects? Can you feel that bruise on your ego?

Be brutally honest with yourself - if it helps, if you don't feel any of the above (or something similar), you're probably not human.

Now you're fully engaged, and aware of how you feel, try to modify it. Acknowledge that you're feeling bad, but remind yourself it's only because your ego is wounded. Realise that the only thing making you feel bad is egotism, but that even that is both instinctive (ie, uncontrollable and not your fault), and a normal part of being human.

Remind yourself that you want to be smart and right and rational about things, and remind yourself that what you're feeling is the feeling of getting smarter, that that's unambiguously good. Try to explicitly relate the uncomfortable sensation to the positive feelings you have about being smart, or correct, or rational in your beliefs. Nice, isn't it? So, like exercise, or taking care of paperwork, that feeling you initially shied away from or avoided is actually a good thing, even if it's briefly uncomfortable in the short term.

Once you're smarter or more right about a subject, you're generally smarter or more right about it for the rest of your life. Isn't that worth a brief, temporary, silly little sting?

Now you've got the hang of it, go out and try to find things you're wrong about. Read up on subjects that interest you. Challenge your beliefs and attitudes by seeking out dissenting opinions and viewpoints, and see if you can prove your existing opinions wrong. Treat it like an intellectual game of conkers - every time you're proven wrong you get a little bit smarter, and every time you win a debate you can reward yourself by being a little more confident in that opinion or line of reasoning.

Test your ideas by subjecting them to challenges, discard the ones which fail and adopt the ones which succeed. And remember - the whole time you're doing it, you're becoming smarter, more educated and more rational.

It's not a moral question, it's a simple impedance mismatch

I was talking with my girlfriend about housework the other day, when I came to a realisation I think explains a lot of the common niggling disputes between men and women (especially men and women in relationships, or who cohabit).

I should probably emphasise first that what I'm discussing here are general trends I've noticed in the genders - when I refer to "men" or "women" I'm discussing these general trends, and nothing in this post necessarily applies to any specific individual or small group of them.

I should also emphasise that my girlfriend is a wonderful, caring, kind woman, and nothing about this specific issue should in any way reflect on her character. Despite our odd little disagreements she's challenging, intelligent and awesome, and I'd hate to imply otherwise.

Moral questions vs. impedance mismatches

Briefly then, my girlfriend always used to get annoyed that our two flatmates (both male) rarely did the washing up - she would get endlessly pissed off that they "were happy to use clean plates where they were available", but always "left it for her to do" when it came to actually washing them.

Now, I know from times when she's been away that they're perfectly happy to do the washing up, but - being slobby, single young guys - they'd rather let a whole load mount up over the course of three of fours days (washing up individual items if required during this time), then tackle the whole lot in one go a couple of times a week.

Basically, my girlfriend prefers a clean kitchen as often as possible (a "little-but-often" strategy to washing up), but because my flatmates aren't bothered by dirty washing next to the sink they prefer to minimise the frequency of washing up they have to do, even if it means doing more when they do do it (a just-in-time washing up strategy, combined with a "rarely-but-a-lot" strategy that occasionally clears the lot).

From my girlfriend's point of view washed plates were "clearly" objectively good and dirty washing up was "clearly" objectively bad, so they were selfishly taking advantage of her and using her as a washing up skivvy, and (as the apparently aggrieved party) she understandably got quite annoyed about this.

However, from my flatmates' point of view clean or dirty plates were both relatively neutral prospects, so by making an arbitrary judgement and then trying to pressure everyone else into doing what she wanted, my girlfriend appeared (being uncharitable) to be an obsessive-compulsive nutter who was constantly cleaning, then getting all annoyed and frustrated with them because they weren't as "unreasonably obsessive" about it as she was.

The key thing here is that neither party was right - rather than a moral or objective right/wrong issue it's a simple impedance mismatch between two different styles of housekeeping.

As long as you don't leave food on the plates to rot and you have enough crockery/cutlery to use there's nothing morally, scientifically or legally wrong with leaving the washing up for a couple of days, then doing it all in one go.

My girlfriend was choosing to tackle the washing up every evening because she "can't relax properly in a dirty house" then essentially blaming the flatmates for not being the same type of person as her.

My flatmates were leaving the washing up, because they're the kind of people who can only relax when they don't have an hour or so's washing up hanging over their heads to be done later in the evening. And as a result they were allowing my girlfriend to do more than her fair share.

To their credit they didn't tend to see it as a value judgement either, so (unsurprisingly given their less-than-fair workload) they didn't tend to judge my girlfriend for her irritation with them. They were more puzzled and confused as to how and why she thought she was entitled to the moral high-ground (especially when there was none to be had) than offended.

In many relationships this mechanism generalises to much/all of the housework, and appears to be a common cause of domestic friction in couples and families.

Another example - should the toilet seat be left up or down?

Another example is the perennial and endless inter-gender wrangling about whether the toilet seat should be left up or down. A lot of women I know see the toilet seat as the same sort of moral issue/value judgement, and request or require that the man put the seat down when he's finished peeing.

When asked why, the most common response is "it looks nicer down", but most men honestly don't care either way, so it looks pretty much the same to us. Moreover, we reason, if it looks nicer with the loo seat down then surely it looks nicest of all with the lid down as well... and yet very few women will make a point of doing that.

The first point suggests to us that it's just an arbitrary, amoral preference rather than a real moral issue, and the second makes it look like an arbitrary and irrational preference at that - regardless of the reasons claimed, women as a group seem to just disingenuously prefer the most convenient option for them, rather than the genuinely nicest-looking one which would put us both out equally.

This is the root of a common objection by men - "well, fair's fair," we think - "the most convenient option for us is to keep the lid up, so why don't you put it back up when you're done?" This is an (admittedly ham-fisted and ill-expressed) attempt to highlight that mere convenience is an inadequate rationale, because it cuts both ways and cancels itself out.

We're trying to explain that we see it as an equal, arbitrary choice with the other party unfairly imposing their choice upon us, rather than the irrational resistance and stubborn attempt to achieve victory that many women apparently see it as.

Since I first noticed this dynamic with the washing-up issue, I've come to realise that this mistaking of simple impedance mismatches for objective moral value-judgements is an incredibly common source of inter-gender friction.

So next time you find yourself in one of those clichéd wrangles, try considering this model, and see if you can isolate and explain the impedance mismatch to the other person instead of merely following the script and getting nowhere.

As I said, lest anyone jump to conclusions my girlfriend is a wonderful woman, but all relationships have these sorts of little niggles, especially when you begin cohabiting. Ever since I realised and explained this process, we've found it much easier to both accommodate the other's desires - she doesn't get so wound up about perceived "taking advantage" of her, and I (and my flatmates) don't mind pitching in and helping out more with the washing up, because we understand now why she was so insistent about doing it so regularly.

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Coda - a plea for assistance

Finally, I'm acutely aware that the two examples above both involve the female partner jumping to make the moral judgement, and not the male. I certainly don't intend to imply this is typically (or even mostly) the case, but I've had a hard time so far coming up with examples of "men" as a group commonly doing it... though it's entirely possible that I'm fundamentally unqualified to do so, by reason of my maleness!

However, I really hesitate to lay the "blame" for these issues generally on the female half of the couple, so I'd be fascinated if any commenters could offer any examples from the female perspective - things that you (or "women generally") really don't care about, but which men tend to instinctively assume is some sort of objective or moral value-judgement.

If so, please do drop me a comment and let me know. ;-)

There are fewer conspiracies than theorists think, but you should still listen carefully to them

Being online for the last 15 years, and having a strong (if sceptical) fascination with conspiracy theories I've run into quite a few over the years.

Many are clearly and obviously ridiculous on the face of them, while others somehow suddenly turn from "ridiculous paranoid fantasy" into "boring history" in the public consciousness - usually (and oddly) without ever passing through the stage of "important and shocking revelation" in-between.

Obviously these days (after years of the X Files and similar cultural touchstones) "conspiracy theory" is a loaded and negative label, and most people instinctively disregard anything described as such. However, I think this is somewhat unfair - there are more conspiracies out there than people typically realise, and they've often played a much larger role in shaping the world than most people give them credit for, even starting wars, bringing down presidents and contributing to the maiming or deaths of hundreds of innocent citizens.

In addition to the "obviously idiotic" and the "obvious-with-hindsight", I believe there is a class of conspiracy theories which - while incomplete and mis-attributed - still conceal a nugget of truth and worthwhile insight, as long as you disregard their more fanciful claims.

As an example, with the rise in filtering systems and various countries' attempts to filter the net, the meme is gaining strength that these are simply cynical excuses by authoritarian governments to restrict their citizens' freedom, and censor the public discourse.

These concerns are persuasive in that they recognise the problems with such systems - that once in place they only tend to ratchet tighter, and that people will accept any amount of change as long as it's introduced in small enough increments. However, systems like censorship (and by extension even really huge conspiracy theories like the idea of the so-called New World Order - an internationalist/globalist conspiracy to dissolve national boundaries and unite the world under one global government) wouldn't necessarily even require a conscious conspiracy.

These trends (if they exist) aren't some Machiavellian super-conspiracy implemented by a smoky room full of the rich and powerful - they're simply the emergent behaviour of lots and lots of different people, all following their own, parochial agendas, who find themselves (often quite unconsciously, or inadvertently) all pushing society in a similar direction.

Returning to net censorship, what happens is that one short-sighted government puts a filtering system in place to filter out "unambiguously evil" content like child pornography, and then later on that mechanism is inherited by later governments, who have their own ideas about what's considered ban-worthy.

Successive governments only encroach on freedom a tiny bit from the previous government, but every time someone complains you get people shouting down dissenters on the grounds "it's only a trivial change, so why are you getting so bent out of shape about it?", or the ever-popular "Yeah, but X is evil - how can you not want X filtered out?" (where X is "terrorism", "hate speech", "child pornography" or the current bête noire.

The other important part of this process is that it's a ratchet effect. Almost no government - short of massive upheaval like a revolution or regime-change - is going to ease off on the filtering, because firstly there's no political capital in doing so, and secondly it would make them look soft on terrorism/paedophilia/whatever the current reason is.

So you have a mechanism where controls ratchet ever-tighter, it's practically impossible to ever loosen them short of a major social upheaval, each step is such a tiny one that people can't emotionally appreciate the importance of resisting it, and anyone who does resist is easily dismissed as reacting disproportionately, or being actively in favour of terrorists, or paedophilia, or whatever the excuse du jour is for "just tightening restrictions a little bit, just this once".

Importantly, and this can't be said enough, this doesn't even require a Machiavellian conspiracy or a particularly authoritarian government behind it - it can happen simply by lots of honest but short-sighted people of good conscience just doing what they think is for the greatest good... but if allowed to run unchecked (and as previously indicated, it's hard to check it without looking like a lunatic or conspiracy theorist) it still ends up in a more restrictive, less free, more authoritarian state in the end.

Project this trend far enough ahead (a few decades is usually enough, although sometimes as little as one will do) and you can quite easily get from an open, successful democratic society to an authoritarian police-state with no large or jarring social upheavals required.

This is exactly why it's so vitally important to never, ever grant any additional powers to any government unless they're absolutely unarguably necessary, and even then grant them for a limited span of time, and never, ever renew them unless there's a proven requirement to do so (ie, never renew because it's the default position to keep the law on the books, as was arguably the case with the PATRIOT Act renewal in 2005/2006).

Plenty of people instinctively recognise themes and trends like these, but a common cognitive illusion called an overactive sense of external agency (PDF warning) causes them to mistake simple but counter-intuitive emergent behaviour for a conscious, intentional conspiracy. This makes them easy to dismiss as paranoid or crazy, and makes it easy for others to dismiss both them and any legitimate trend they've identified (an example of the Association Fallacy, also known as damning by association).

Clearly I'm not suggesting that all (or even most) conspiracy theories are realistic, accurate or plausible. However, if you run across one it's always worth making an effort to separate out the What and the How from the Who and the Why, and seeing if the processes and effects it describes have any validity on their own.

If someone tells you that a concerted cabal of international bankers and financiers are attempting to bring together and integrate the disparate economies of the world, dissolving national sovereignty and bring the world to heel under one world government made up of shape-changing lizards, you can safely laugh at the lizards.

However, shorn of its intentional (and sensationalist) nature, there is a distinct trend towards economic and political integration in international politics, the advent of the internet and international trade deals have inadvertently acted to make national boundaries progressively more porous, and increasing geopolitical integration necessarily reduces national sovereignty somewhat.

When you put it like that it's boring and mundane, but wild-eyed, crazy-haired conspiracy theorists have been pointing out the What of it since the 70s or 80s, and - vaccinated against listening by their kook-like presentation and the cultural stereotype of the "crazy conspiracy theorist" - most of us still aren't even consciously aware it's going on.

I find that extremely interesting, although I ascribe to it no particular group, agenda or intent.

Say it with me: dumb ideas are dumb

There is a prevalent and dangerous meme rife in society today, and though some people may find the following offensive, judgemental or unfashionable, I believe it needs to be said. Your forbearance is therefore appreciated while I do so. ;-)

First, some axioms. These should be unarguable:

• Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
• Not everyone's opinions is as valid, useful or has as much merit as everyone else's in every single situation.
• Nobody is entitled to their own facts.
• You have freedom of speech, thought and association. You do not have freedom from criticism, freedom from offence or freedom from correction.

The problem happened where the first axiom (a healthy recognition that other people have different opinions) turned into the second and subsequent beliefs; that everyone's opinion is equally valid, and that contradicting someone in error is impolite, arrogant or somehow infringing on their freedoms.

One look in some Lit Crit classrooms will show you what happens when you aren't allowed to contradict or dispute someone else's opinions, and one look in a politicised fundamentalist church will show you what happens when you believe you're allowed your own facts, instead of just your own opinions.

And while people might enjoy studying Lit Crit or subscribe to fundamentalist religions, if they've got any sense they'll notice that people acting in either of these two roles have rarely done anything tangible to better the overall lot of their fellow man... unlike all those rude, elitist, judgemental, snobby scientists, engineers, geeks and other educated types (who instinctively recognise that ideas vary in quality and efficacy, and have therefore been quietly and industriously changing the world for the better for the last few hundred years).

The Western world (ably lead, as ever, by America) is learning the hard way what happens when you confuse recognition of existence of everyone's opinions with equality or worth of everyone's opinions. Moreover, while we mouth thought-terminating clichés like "everyone deserves an equal say", we routinely disregard them in practice. Who seriously consults their toddler in the back seat on how to get home when lost in the car? Who leaves their neurosurgeon's office and seeks a second opinion from their local garage mechanic?

It's ok to judge and disregard things which demonstrably have no merit. We commonly all agree that "all people" deserve some sort of minimum baseline freedoms, protection, treatment and standard of living. And yet we still deny some of those benefits to those people who we have judged and found undeserving of them or actively dangerous (imprisoned criminals, for example).

We try to pretend that all ideas are equal, but it's not true - some ideas are brilliant, explanatory and useful, but some are stupid, dangerous or self-destructive. And refusing to judge them and pretending those ideas are harmless, valid or beneficial has much the same effect on society in the long term as refusing to judge dangerous people would have on society - internal chaos and developmental stagnation.

We don't have to ban stupid ideas or opinions, like we don't have to kill criminals. Instead we isolate criminals using jails so they can't damage society any more.

We can do the same with ideas, simply by agreeing they're dumb.

Refusing to publicly label a dumb idea "dumb" for fear of offending someone is - long term - as bad for our culture and society as refusing to lock away criminals "because their families might be upset".

Although it's unpopular to point out, sometimes people and ideas need to be judged for the good of society, even if it does end up upsetting or offending some people.

For the last decade or two - beginning around the advent of political correctness, though I suspect that was a symptom rather than a cause - we've done the intellectual equivalent of systematically dismantling the judicial system and all the courts and prisons in society. Now - in the same way if we dismantled all the prisons we'd be overrun with criminals - we're overrun with stupid ideas, unqualified but strongly-expressed opinions and people who act as if they can choose their own facts.

The only way you can help redress this situation is by not being afraid to offend people - if someone says something stupid, call them on it. Politely but firmly correct when people make erroneous claims. Question badly-thought-out ideas, and don't let people get away with hand-waving or reasoning based on obvious flaws or known logical fallacies. Yes they'll get annoyed, and yes they'll choose to take offence, but we don't free criminals because they or their families are "offended" at their having to stay in prison. They are there - largely - because they deserved and invited it, and because the world is better with them there. Likewise, dumb ideas deserve and invite correction, and the world would be a better place for everybody if more people judged and criticised them when we came across them.

Sometimes uncomfortable things do need to happen to people, and certainly if they invite them. There's no advancement without the possibility of failure, and removing the opportunity for failure removes the opportunity to develop. If no-one ever tells you you're wrong, how will you ever learn?

But most important of all, while judging people is unfashionable, can be dangerous and should largely be left to trained professionals, don't ever be afraid to judge ideas.

Internet memes are not without purpose

Internet Memes get a lot of stick - they're usually considered mildly amusing at best, and sterile, content-free, mindless, bovine group-think at worst. However, both these assessments are incomplete - they fall into the trap of judging memes as "good" or "bad", instead of asking "why they are" at all.

Memes aren't just jokes - they're the way we form bonds and generate shared context in distributed virtual communities, just like "living near" and "saying hello every day" were the ways we formed context and social bonds in physical, centralised communities like villages, and "chatting around the water-cooler" and "bitching about the boss" are ways we form social bonds and shared context at work.

Part of the problem in society is that as we centralise in huge cities with too many people we don't know we lose the feeling of belonging to a distinct community, which is why city life can be so isolating for some, and others fulfil the need elsewhere (churches, sports teams, hobby/interest clubs, etc).

The only difference between this and the kind of people who make up the core of communities like reddit, Fark or 4chan is that instead of physically going somewhere to interact with other community-members, we're geographically separated and typically a lot more diverse in terms of outlook, age, race, physical appearance and interests.

This means that - for a community to form - we require shared context and some way of differentiating between people "in the community" and those out of it. This is where memes, references and in-jokes come it... and it's also why we have terms like "redditor" or "digger", instead of "people who read reddit" or "people who read Digg".

You can even compare different kinds of communities, and memes seem overwhelmingly to arise where other, more traditional forms of shared-context-building are unavailable or inapplicable:

• At one extreme, memes rarely arise in traditional physical communities - it's pretty rare where a village - say - gives birth to catchphrases or memes, because the community already has plenty of shared context from living in the same region, sharing the same culture and language, sharing largely the same core beliefs and seeing each other regularly.
• TV shows pioneered the way, where catchphrases and quotes (though typically only a few per show) could be used to find and bond with like-minded individuals when we encountered them, even though we didn't necessarily live near them, or see them regularly.
• Moving online, sites like Facebook are still largely clustered around groups of people who have some real-world relationship, and though people occasionally make use of imported memes from other communities for the purpose of humour, for this reason these sites still rarely give birth to new memes.
• More frequently, memes arise from forums (fora?) or social news sites like Slashdot, reddit and Digg. These are sites with a strictly limited ability to share context - their communities are culturally, socially and intellectually extraordinarily diverse, and stories are posted (and disappear beneath later submissions) so fast that there's no guarantee that any two individuals will have seen the same news or read the same content from one day to the next. Practically all that these sites offer in the way of shared-context-building is the ability to recognise the usernames of other users when they post, which - with the sheer number of users - is a wildly inadequate method to generate strong social bonds.
• Most clearly of all, 4chan is a website which is prolific in the generation of new memes - indeed, many memes which users of other sites assume originated there in fact originated on 4chan. 4chan is also unusual in that it does not enforce uniqueness of username, but instead assigns a deeply unmemorable number as the only guarantee that a given "Bob Smith" is the same as a "Bob Smith" whose comments you remember reading previously. In fact, 4chan even allows completely anonymous posting, and in 4chan's most famous meme-originating boards (/b/ and others) the overwhelming majority of posters post anonymously. This means that users are literally bereft of any way to reliably recognise each other or establish a sense of community, and they're simultaneously the most prolific creators of internet memes.

You can see from this trend that memes are a distinct method of community-building, almost unknown in human history, which has largely evolved in the last few decades in response to the increasing isolation of modern life, with its lack of traditional ways to build shared context or easily encounter familiar individuals.

When you get right down to it we're social monkeys, who are usually happiest in a tribe of one kind or another. Due to lifestyle and technology how we form and maintain those tribes is changing, even in the last a few years, and if we can resist the temptation to dismissively complain about this emergent behaviour it can teach us a lot - both about ourselves and about the new kinds of communities we are forming.

Your Kids Aren't Lazy; They're Just Smarter Than You

There's a recurring theme in the media, and in conversations with members of older generations, and it goes something like this:

"Kids these days have no concentration span. They're always Twittering or texting or instant messaging, and they're always playing these loud, flashy computer games instead of settling down to listen to the radio or read a good book. Computer games and the internet are ruining our kids minds! Won't someone think of the children?"

Oddly enough, these criticisms are often associated with complaints that "kids will spend all hours of the day on the bloody internet or playing these damned games, instead of going outside and climbing trees or riding their bikes", although nobody seems to see the inherent contradiction there.

In a nutshell it's this: surely if these kids really had poor attention spans they'd get bored of the game in short order and move onto something else? And if they lacked the ability for delayed gratification how would they manage to spend hours unlocking every achievement in Soul Calibur or grinding for loot on World of Warcraft?

I've been thinking for a while that much of the perceived "reduction in attention span" is merely kids getting bored with an activity that has inadequate input bandwidth to satisfy them.

For example, my grandparents could sit and listen to the radio with their eyes shut for hours on end, but the pathetically slow drip... drip... drip of information through the radio would rapidly drive me to distraction. Even my parents have trouble doing this - they usually listen to the radio while also doing other things, like household chores or driving.

Likewise, my parents can sit and watch TV for hours on end, but even this eventually bores me - being forced into passively watching and waiting for programmes to get to the point or adverts to finish leaves my brain with too much spare capacity - I either start to over-analyse the content of the show and get annoyed by the perceived agenda, or I start to get fidgety and end up picking up a book or going and doing something more engaging.

Conversely I can browse the web, program or play computer games for hours on end, and observation of most younger people will bear out that this is the norm, rather than the exception. The problem here is clearly not attention-span, or I'd rapidly get bored of surfing or gaming just as I get bored of the radio or TV.

The problem here is that with radio and TV the rate information comes to me is slower, and is determined by an external source - the broadcaster.

Conversely, when I'm playing a game or surfing the web the information-flow is limited only by my ability to absorb it. Result: my attention is fully engaged, I don't get fidgety or bored, and I'm happy indefinitely.

Books are another telling case: personally I love reading, and most "short attention span" kids I know who have a good reading-speed can still sit and read books (surely the least instantly-gratifying and most boring-looking of all media) indefinitely. Their reading-speed matches or exceeds their information-absorption rate, so they're happy.

On the other hand, even "normal" kids I know who have a slow reading-speed get bored and restless after only minutes of reading - even though their information-absorption rate is low, it's still higher than their reading-speed can provide, so they get bored.

I've noticed this in my grandparents, parents and myself, and I'm just past 30. I'd be frankly gob-smacked if this didn't apply to kids who'd only grown up in a world of globally-networked computers, millions of channels, the web at their fingertips and ever-increasing amounts of data to sift through.

It also raises questions about the sudden and questionable upsurge in diagnoses of low-grade ADHD and related disorders in young people over the last few years. Although in the more serious cases these are undoubtedly very real disorders, it's entirely possible that at the lower end much of what the older generation (and psycho-pharmaceuticals industry) perceive as pathological behaviour is simply plain old frustrated boredom in minds adapted to faster and better information-processing than they're capable of.

In summary, I suspect this phenomenon has little to do with "short attention spans", and everything to do with old media (still largely aimed at the older generations) appearing frustratingly slow and boring to ever-more-agile minds raised in our ever-more-information-rich society.

If this is true, this phenomenon could actually be a good thing - our brains are getting faster and better at information-processing, so things which seemed fun to our slower, less-capable ancestors now seem un-stimulating, or no better than momentary diversions.

However, generations who found crocheting or games of "tag" or charades the most amazingly fun experience in their lives now have to watch kids try their cherished childhood hobbies before discarding them as boring, trivial or simplistic.

It's therefore understandable that they find it a lot more comforting to automatically decide there's something wrong with kids today (a refrain that echoes down through the generations)... rather than realise that their own brains are by comparison so poor at information-processing that activities that were stimulating to them as children are just too simple for kids these days.