Life, The Universe and Everything – Page 6 – Missives from the 6th Floor

Moment of Calm

The movers came back this afternoon and retrieved the empty boxes. Aside from re-homing a few things the owners left behind, and waiting for the dining table and rug we ordered to arrive, we’re “done moving.”

I can see how with practice, and discipline to not accumulate “stuff,” one could get good at moving. I’m not convinced it’s a skill I want to develop.

So this weekend will be a time to recharge before the inevitable goat-rodeo that is the US presidential election kicks into high gear next week.

Despite being largely disconnected from social media, I’ve been fairly inundated with encouragement to vote. Usually accompanied by a specious claim that the advice giver “doesn’t care who you vote for, just that you vote.”

Of course they care. They want you to vote for who they’re voting for.

Both sides are convinced it’ll be the end of the world if “the other side” wins.

Maybe one side is right. Maybe both sides are.

So I guess I’ll add my voice to the chorus.

If you’re eligible to do so, please vote.

Vote against kakistocracy. Against the normalization of lies. Against divisiveness. Against misogyny. Against xenophobia. Against kleptocracy. Against willful ignorance and sciolism.

Just over four years ago I was in Edinburgh, struggling to come to grips with the election, and wrote this.

I wonder what I’ll be writing this time.

And when the dust will have settled enough to write it.

Don’t Wait for the Important to Become Urgent

It’s been a hell of a weekend.

Lemme me explain.

No. There is too much. Lemme sum up.

We’re moving out of our apartment. We’re not sure exactly when we’re moving, or where we’re moving to yet, but it turns out by not fixing the roof during the dry weather – when they had the chance – the building management company lost any hope of keeping this apartment habitable.

Over the rains this weekend, leaking doors and a couple dripping lights turned into heavier leaks and more leaky lights, and a few spots of wet plasterboard became many spots, growing quickly. We disassembled the “not leaking yet” former-guest-bedroom-cum-office and turned it back into a bedroom.

A roofing contractor came out yesterday (on a Sunday, so you know that cost someone a pretty penny) – looked at the interior, went out onto the terraces and climbed onto the main roof in the dumping rain, and gave us his professional opinion:

“The building needs a new roof, all this decking has to be taken up to replace the roof under it, and to do any of this, it has to be dry.”

Of course the building management couldn’t take him at his word, so today a building surveyor came out, looked at all the same stuff (but did it in the dry) and gave his professional opinion.

“The building needs a new roof, all this decking has to be taken up to replace the roof under it, and to do any of this, it has to be dry.”

It won’t be dry enough, for long enough, for months.

So it’s time for us to beat a hasty retreat.

So we’re working on figuring out where we (two humans, two cats) can go in the short term while we look for a new place. We’ll be out looking at flats tomorrow afternoon and working through the logistics of getting our selves and our belongings moved out of an increasingly leaky flat. And figuring out who’s going to pay for it (hint: not us).

The owner of the apartment wil be left with an empty, decaying apartment. And unless they can find a way to at least stabalize the roof and contain water once we leave, the water will undoubetdly affect the units below us.

They’ve turned a medium sized problem into a huge problem by ignoring it.

Fixing the roof was important over the summer, but it wasn’t urgent. The pandemic certainly didn’t make roof work easy, but the building sites in view of our apartment kept working through most of the summer, so it was possible.

Now, thanks to waiting for the bad weather to return, fixing the roof is urgent and has become effectively impossible.

If this were my property, and I was a customer of the building management firm, I’d be lawyering up.

But it’s not my property, so my goal is to extricate us from this accelerating fluster-cluck.

Stay tuned.

It’s Raining in the Bedroom (there are no points for effort)

Our apartment is on the 5th and 6th floors of the building. Our kitchen and living space are directly under the building roof, and our bedrooms are under exterior terraces.

Last year, as the fall rains started, we had a couple leaks in the roof, including one that had water dripping out of an electric light fixture. We contacted the property manager, given how paranoid the Brits are about having electricity anywhere near the water in their bathrooms, pointed out this was probably a “health and safety” hazard, and that “we’ll have someone out in a few days” wasn’t sufficient.

They managed to find someone to come out that very day, he went up on the roof and did a temporary repair, and they painted over the damp plasterboard with an anti-mold paint.

“We’ll schedule a proper repair in the spring.”

I bet you already see where this is going.

Despite multiple building sites in sight of our building remaining active through most of lock-down, no “proper repair” works were scheduled. So yesterday, on the first “real” rainy day of the season, it was hardly surprising that it started raining in the bedroom.

Again.

We’ve got catch basins under the dripping light fixtures in two of the three bedrooms, and are once again invoking the well worn “health and safety” argument. It’s gotten us from “if I don’t have a date from the contractor by Monday I’ll contact an alternate” to “there will be an electrician out today and a roofing contractor out tomorrow morning.”

But getting what seems the obvious right thing to happen has taken far, far too much energy and angst.

And discussing our options and how to respond to this latest crisis has revealed a(nother) fundamental difference in world view between Dawnise and I.

To me, in a business context, you don’t get credit for effort. You get credit for results. Dawnise gives you points for trying.

I think it’s reprehensible that we teach children in the US that they’ll get “partial credit” for incorrect answers. As a teacher, partial credit is often used as an incentive to get students to “show their work.” By rewarding them for “thinking out loud” you have a better chance of understanding where they’re going wrong and correcting them. And that’s good.

But it doesn’t extend to the rest of life.

The property manager and building manager are being responsive, and seem to be trying to engage the right people and processes to solve this problem.

At the end of the day, I don’t care if they’re trying, I care if they’re succeeding.

P.S. The lift is still broken.

Set and Manage Expectations

Some years back (cough c.2001 cough) I was at a startup across a change of senior technical leadership. The CTO, who was and is a friend of mine, left and was replaced by someone chosen by the investors. The replacement was – to be a bit rude – mostly useless. Much more “chief” than “technical officer.”

This fellow – who I only worked with briefly, and who’s name I’ve long since forgotten – ended up imparting something I’ve only recognized the real value of over time.

His “thing” was the importance of setting and managing expectations. Not just for managers, for everyone.

If you were on the hook for something, he was insistent that you tell the dependant party when you expected to deliver. He was downright millitant that as soon as you realized your estimate was wrong – regardless of why it was wrong – you told anyone who was depending on you.

If you couldn’t provide a new estimate, he insisted that you tell them when you would be providing that new estimate (a “date for a date”).

So if you were on the hook to deliver something by Friday, and on the preceeding Tuesday discovered additional work that put Friday at risk – he insisted you approach the party depending on your Friday deliverable on Tuesday and tell them your delivery was at risk. If you could give them a new date for delivery, great (“I think it’s going to take two more days, so I’ll be done next Tuesday”) and if you couldn’t, you needed to tell them when you’d come back with an estimate (“I’m not sure how big a disruption this is, I’ll get back to you by close of business tomorrow.”)

Acting this way gave people who depended on you options. They could look for ways to help you hit your your previous estimate (“if someone helped you with the thing that’s come up would that let us hit Friday?”). They could factor your change into their plans, and inform people who were waiting on them. If necessary, they could look for ways not to dependend on you.

Over time this “proactive transparency” would help the organization get better at estimation, and identify people and teams who weren’t getting better and figure out why and how to improve. Or at least that was the theory. The company ceased being a going concern not too long after.

This may all seem super obvious to anyone who started their career in software “post agile manifesto” but it certainly wasn’t representative of my experience in software up to that point. This was the first overt recognition I’d seen from “management” that plans change, and that how you handle that change is important.

Prior to that, dates were set in stone – and everyone pretended they never changed. (“So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.”) There was no accepted way to express that while hitting a target was always desirable, it wasn’t always possible. And by being up front about changes to your expected ability to deliver on commitments you could at least reduce the last minute negative surprise and resulting scramble.

This focus on setting and managing expectations extends far beyond software. I’ve been chasing the building manager about the lift for two days now. She can’t give me anything like an estimate because she doesn’t have one (isn’t demanding one) from the service company. If they had to provide one, they’d have to demand one from whomever they’re waiting on, and so on. It wouldn’t necessarily result in anything being fixed faster* but it just might make it harder to assume that everyone in the chain of responsibility is inept.

* Sometimes the need to tell someone you’re going to let them down incents you to find ways not to let them down, but that’s hard to take to the bank.

It is what it is

As someone utterly incompetent said recently, “it is what it is.”

A month ago, I characterized London as “slowly creeping toward normal.” Today, London has been placed on the COVID “watch list” – which as far as I can tell means Boris and Co. will sit and watch as we cede the gains made in containing the spread of the virus.

It ended up taking just about a month to get my BRP back from the DVLA, and a few days later my provisional driving license arrived. License number in hand, I was able to schedule a theory test. I took the first available, which turned out to be over a month out – the 3rd Monday in October. So I’ve got plenty of time to forget (and review) the material. And, of course, I can’t schedule the practical exam until I’ve passed the theory test. This country could stand to learn a thing or two about pipelining.

Once I had my license, I reached out to a handful of driving instructors. Most of them were either on sabbatical or were fully booked. I ultimately booked an hour with one who was neither. We got on reasonably well, and he was good at pointing out habits (like palm steering) that I’ll need to suppress for the exam. Once I can book a test, I’ll book a test, and he and I will spend another couple lessons in his Kia before I sit it. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to have it done by Christmas.

At his suggestion, I took a couple practice “hazard perception tests.” They show you a video from the point-of-view of a driver, you have to click on the screen when there’s a “developing hazard.” Your score depends on how early you recognize the hazard and react. These tests were clearly not made for motorcyclists. My first attempts I scored nul points – each of my clicks was just before the scoring window opened. Of course that farm equipment traveling parallel to the road is a hazard, waiting for it to turn into my path seems counter-productive. So before taking the test I need to practice reacting later. Somehow that seems very British.

Life has otherwise found a routine. I’ve been running three days a week, though we’ll see how devoted I am as the wet winter starts. Dawnise does the weekly shop and I help her mule it home. With apologies to Casablanca, “she buys the food, I cook the food, we eat the food. It is fairly convenient.” Most weekends we visit our local cafe for brunch, and we read the news from America with a mix of frustration, sadness, fear and resignation.

I’ve continued keeping track of noteworthy COVID-related articles I’ve read, though there have only been a handful in the past month that have made the list. And I’ve posted a few other thoughts that haven’t been about “life in London” and so haven’t been sent to this list.

So I’d say we’re still doing well, overall. We’ve had some rough days, for sure – when it’s been hard to remember we’re both on the same team – but more good days than bad ones.

I’ve started, several times, to write something about the election, or American politics more generally, but each time I’ve tried I end up deleting the draft and walking away. I’m at a total loss about how to have positive impact on any of those issues, but it’s reasonably clear that shouting into the electronic void won’t change anything.

So we’ll vote (absentee, it’s much better than mail in voting). And hope that enough of the country agrees with our perspective to vote with us. And hope that the popular vote carries the day. The whole thing seems dangerously close to the definition of insanity.

Doing the same thing, expecting a different result.

Tit for Tat: American Democracy and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

It should come as a surprise to no one that the party in power in the US is pushing to install a new supreme court justice with haste – before an election they stand a non-zero chance of losing.

The fact that this same group vociferously and successfully obstructed a similar appointment four years ago is being broadly cast as “evidence of hypocrisy.” If it’s hypocrisy isn’t the point, the point is they understand the game they’re playing, and are playing to win. Call it (calling out?) hypocrisy doesn’t change anything.

The prisoner’s dilemma, in case you’ve forgotten, is a simple game with rules often phrased something like this:

You and a partner-in-crime are arrested. You’re kept apart, unable to communicate. You’re both told that if you both admit to the crime, you’ll each face 3 years incarceration. If you both stay silent, there’s sufficient evidence to convict on a lesser charge, so you’ll both face one year in jail. If one of you implicates the other, who stays silent, the silent implicated party will be jailed for 5 years, and the betrayer set free.”

To people who study games the window dressing (crime and jail) don’t really matter – what matters is the relationship between cooperation, betrayal, and rewards.

It should be evident that both players end up best if they cooperate and stay silent. But if one party betrays the other, the betrayer suffers no penalty and imposes a larger one on the one they betray. So for each individual player, betrayal looks like a better outcome than cooperation. The net result is that mutual betrayal is, in a sense, the most likely outcome.

A single play of the game is interesting as a study in trust and self-interest. And individual political outcomes are often intuitively understandable by treating them “roughly” as a prisoners dilemma. But what we should be thinking about are repeated plays of the game.

Implicit in the relationship between cooperation and self-interest, and often overlooked, is the equality between the actors. Betrayal from either actor penalizes equally. This equality means “if you hurt me, I can hurt you.” And so it’s fairly easy to convince ones self that if you’re playing the prisoners dilemma over and over against the same opponent, a good strategy might be to initially cooperate, and then “do unto them as they did unto you.”

Tit for tat.

Intuitively most of us would call this strategy “fair,” and it turns out to be both simple to describe and highly effective at achieving cooperation.

Tit-for-tat clearly isn’t generally possible in American politics, due to party power dynamics if nothing else – but I wonder how the party and partisans would behave if it was.

Always ask why

The family story (“legend” just sounds pretentious) is that one of my most valuable, and likely most irritating, habits was instilled and encouraged at a young age by my uncle Denis. “Always,” he advised, “ask why.” I’ve always imagined it must have caused my parents some consternation that his was a direction I chose to listen to.

Fast forward a bunch, and I’m working at one of the A’s in FAANG (the river, not the fruit). Like any large company, it has a culture. Some of its norms and customs have been instituted deliberately, others have accreted, all have evolved. Adherence to those customs is a large part what it means to “be one of us.” While I disagree with some of those customs, in the aggregate I think they’re positive. One such positive, in my view, is that we look critically at our mistakes, try to understand root causes, and to capture those observations and lessons in written form and publish them, so that others might learn vicariously. And part of that process is to ask the five whys.

The nuance, and the value, in the five whys approach is is asking ‘the right’ question at each iteration, stress-testing the answers, and following the chain of causality, even if – especially if – it leads in unexpected directions. When it works, the illumination can be blinding.

So what, I hear you ask? Well, I’m reading more and more in the “main-stream media” asserting that social media may just might be hurting us. What I don’t read much of, if any, is thoughtful analysis of the how and why. Mostly, the argument goes, it’s because they have all the data – and with enough data, “they” (whoever “they” are) can make us do what they want. Some sort of social-media mass hypnosis.

This, to put it crudely, sets off my bullshit detector.

I don’t think it can be wholly explained by Facebook, or Twitter, or Mark Zuckerberg and all the data they have about us. They have the data we give them. If an individual tends to engage with content that’s dishonest, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, or antiscience – the algorithms didn’t make them do it. The person is making the choices. Clicking the links. Clicking some more.

I also don’t think it’s Trump. Don’t get me wrong, he’s pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, and antiscience, but he didn’t create any of those things. And regardless if he was elected to office because of those traits or in spite of them, he didn’t invent anything. He tapped into something existing. Exploited it.

So the algorithms feed us what we show them we want – it’s just operant conditioning – and we’re conditioning the algorithm. Living in a filter bubble certainly doesn’t makes us better, more rounded, people – but feedback loops amplify an input signal. They don’t create it.

So where does that leave us?

If you’re one of those people, like me, who have concluded that social media is a clear and present danger to democracy, ask yourself why. And keep asking. Because you can’t fix a problem until you understand it, and I believe we need to fix this problem.

And, like that, it’s gone

Today is “Summer Bank Holiday.” I have, basically, no idea what that means – but I can’t help but think that it says something deep about British culture that the country all but shuts down on “bank holidays.”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” [1]

I also can’t help but notice – as the days grow slightly shorter, my morning runs cooler, and the afternoon light more golden – that in a few short weeks another Summer will officially be over.

The Earth made another voyage around the sun and all most of us got was this lousy pandemic.

I’m not sure why it matters to me. Dawnise and I rarely travel in the summer – we have no kids, so we’re not bound by the traditional school year, and Dawnise and hot weather don’t get along particularly well, so we usually do our traveling in the Spring and Fall.

Never-the-less, I feel like I’ve missed something.

Life in London is slowly creeping toward normal. More people on the streets. More people commuting to work. The response to the government’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme suggests that people are willing to set health concerns aside in return for £10 off their meal bill. The scheme ends today, so soon we’ll see how many of those discount diners remember how much they used to enjoy eating food they didn’t cook, and wasn’t delivered by a guy on a scooter, and keep going out for meals.

Even the theaters have started re-opening, though I’m unsure who’s attending the socially distanced shows. Sitting through a multi-hour performance wearing a mask is somewhere near the opposite of my idea of a good time.

In the midst of all this, and almost certainly because of all this, the case count across the UK is trending up. The hospitalization and mortality rates aren’t following, and while that’s clearly good news, it does raise obvious questions.

In more positive news, thanks to a roughly £1.9 million investment from the UK government, the Cambridge vaccine could be in trials ‘by autumn.’

In mundane news, my BRP is still in the hands of the driver and vehicle licensing agency (DVLA). A polite, but basically pointless, online chat asking when I might have my identity document back ended with “hopefully not too much longer.”

Good thing we’re not planning to go anywhere for a bit.

When an errand feels like an adventure, and other thoughts

Long ago, nearly in the before-time, I bought a merino wool base layer from Mountain Warehouse. Since I was ordering anyway, I added a few speculative items to the basket, as did Dawnise. On arrival most of the speculative items were earmarked for return. As the UK was busily shutting down, we put the the stuff in a closet.

(queue time passing)

I thought of that bag, sitting in the closet, on our way home from brunch this morning and decided to see if I could still arrange a return. It was months past purchase, long past their official returns policy. For a while their website had a message about extending return windows, but the message was now gone. So, expecting at least a bit of an argument, I tossed the goods in a backpack and walked a mile to the shop.

Aside from my morning run it’s was the furthest I’ve ventured on foot in months, and in a different direction. A few blocks after setting out I felt like an intrepid explorer. Surely no one has been here for months! I thought. Only to turn a corner and find a few people sitting on benches in park. Hrm. Ok. Clearly someone has. By the time I reached my destination it all seemed almost familiar, and normal. I donned my mask, had a quick chat with the shop attendant who was more than happy to accommodate the return. I took a different route home, arriving just before a sudden cloudburst would have soaked me through.

And now I can tell Dawnise tales of far off lands she hasn’t seen in half a year.

So that was that.

In more serious news, it seems the federal occupation of Portland is extending to more cities, including Seattle. I keep wondering if, one morning, I’m going to wake up to learn our townhouse in the city is under siege. Or is no more.

These are not questions I expect to have to ask about a self-proclaimed first world democracy.

Category: Life, The Universe and Everything