craschworks

Boy, busy day today!

04:00 Bounced out of bed. Called Tony Robbins. Told him: “Cheer up, today's another day!”
04:15 Bowl of oat groats and mixed berries. Hmm…hmm..
04:30 Swedish aerobics.
05:30 Airlifted blind orphans from Cuba to D.C.
08:30 Changed batteries in G.W. Bush unit.
09:00 Did 's nails.
09:30 Snacktime: apple plus cheese and crackers. Sold MSFT short.
09:35 Released worm. Covered short. Sigh. Another day, another $50 million.
10:35 Bridge with Warren. Won northern Nebraska and See's candy chain. Told me to “Fuck off!” when I told him he had a gambling problem.
11:20 Hurley called again. Must get unlisted number.
12:30 Checked LJ. Exchanged witty banter with .
12:45 Lunched with Greenspan. Man, doesn't he ever get tired of the “pull my finger” routine? Crabcake was delicious though.
01:30 Mud wrestling with Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.
03:30 Nap. Dreamt about playing “nursing home pinball”.
04:30 Played “nursing home pinball” on my Segway
06:30 Bowling with Kim Sung Il. Told him he put too much jouche in his hair again. Now he's all sullen.
07:30 Sent next set of songs to Eminem.
08:30 Answered children's letters to Santa.
09:30 Dinner with Angelina. She cooked a delicious Porterhouse. Strange girl, but oh, such lips. Note to self: next time, I'm the one tying the scarves.
10:30 Hef called. No, it's 1/2 pill every 2 hours, not 2 pills every 1/2 hour. Man can never keep it straight.
10:45 Introspective moment. Asked myself: does money really buy happiness?
10:50 Chortled heartily.
11:00 Bedtime

The truth about sexual attraction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4732308-111397,00.html

Joan Roughgarden, who was once a man, thinks Darwin got it wrong about
sex. By Laura Spinney

Laura Spinney
Thursday August 14, 2003
The Guardian

On a sweltering day in June 1997, a gay pride parade passed down
Market Street, San Francisco. Among the thousands marching was Joan -
then Jonathan – Roughgarden, a theoretical ecologist and marine
biologist of some repute. A few months later, at 52, she underwent a
sex change to become a transgendered woman. But that day was a turning
point of a different sort. “I was looking at all these people and
realising that my discipline said they weren't possible,” she recalls.
“Homosexuality is not supposed to exist, according to biology.”

She did not know what the future held for her, but she resolved that
if she managed to keep her job as a biology professor at Stanford
University she would explore how widespread variation in gender and
sexuality was in the animal kingdom. In the event she was forced to
give up some administrative responsibilities and started to catalogue
homosexuality in other species.

What she found astounded her. Studies document same-sex courtship
rituals and mating in more than 300 species. Still more species have
multiple genders, or exhibit gender reversal and hermaphroditism. Yet
no one had collated them, no one had sought to explain this
phenomenon. “Biologists know there is a problem there, they know there
is a lot of same-sex sexuality, and it is in the back of everyone's
mind that we are going to have to deal with it at some point,” she
says.

The problem is that dealing with it means challenging the master text
in biology: Darwin's theory of evolution. Or more precisely, the part
on the selection of sexual characteristics. In her book Evolution's
Rainbow, due out next March, Roughgarden asserts that Darwin's theory
is “false and inadequate” and that there is no patching it up.

Her main point of contention is over Darwin's notion that females
select males for show, because their showy secondary sexual
characteristics – the peacock's tail, for instance – reflect good
genes. Because eggs are supposed to be costly to produce and sperm
cheap, this in turn has led to the stereotypical – and, she believes,
erroneous – depiction of males as promiscuous and females as coy and
discerning. That false message has been picked up by evolutionary
biologists, says Roughgarden, but you only have to look at animal
societies to see that it is not true.

Take Japanese macaques, whose females are promiscuously gay. During
the breeding season, they form lesbian consortships as well as
heterosexual pairings. Among bonobos – the only primates apart from us
to mate face-to-face – most females indulge in lesbian behaviour,
rubbing their vulvas together, because, says Roughgarden, “If you did
not do it, then you would not have any sisters. You would not have any
buddies. It is absolutely necessary.”

Bonobos perfectly illustrate the theory she offers up to replace
Darwin's: social selection. According to this, much of the sexual
behaviour observed in animals is not designed to propagate genes, at
least not directly, but to make the protagonist socially acceptable to
a powerful clique, thus ensuring him or her access to potential mates
and a safe environment.

The penis of the female spotted hyena is very similar to the male's,
although it contains the urethra and birth canal. This she erects and
flashes about to other females, says Roughgarden, to advertise her
eligibility to join their gang. “The party line is that genitals are
used for the exchange of sperm,” she says. “But the fact is that among
mammals, they are often coloured very brightly and are bigger than
they need to be.” She believes oversized genitalia, the peacock's tail
and perhaps even the enormous human brain evolved as a medium of
communication, of body language between members of the same sex,
because of this need for social inclusion.

The second part of her theory is that females do not choose males for
their genes, as Darwin taught, but to avoid “deadbeat dads”. She says
females manage male power by selecting for good fathers rather than
good sperm. This, she believes, creates a marketplace for reproductive
opportunity.

Dominant males have a lot on their plate, maintaining their physical
condition, controlling large territories and seeing off challengers.
So it is in their interest to sub-contract out the task of finding a
mate. The example she gives is the bluegill sunfish of North America,
where a dominant male will recruit a smaller, feminine male -
so-called because he sports female colours – in what looks like a
homosexual courtship. They mate with a female in a menage � trois. The
conventional view is that the feminine male mimics the female to steal
copulations. But Roughgarden says no one has proved the dominant male
does not know the feminine male is male. She argues that he is
negotiating a reproductive opportunity for both himself and the
dominant male, that he may have been “schooled” with the females and
therefore brings to the deal his prior rapport with them. Data show
females prefer to enter territories containing dominant and feminine
males.

She admits there is no direct evidence to support her hypothesis and
has a get-out clause, arguing that as a theoretical ecologist it is
her job to explain diversity and the job of experimentalists to gather
the proof. Paul Vasey, a behavioural neurobiologist at the University
of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, studies Japanese macaques in their
habitat of Mount Fuji. He says their lesbian pairings in the breeding
season do not promote social cohesion, because '- just as in
heterosexual pairs – the females avoid incest. Dominant females will
often also protect their subordinate lesbian partners against
higher-ranking aggressors. In his opinion, their motivation is pure
sensual pleasure.

Perhaps, in taking on Darwin, Roughgarden only wants to set the ball
rolling. In the book she makes clear her personal and political
standpoint, warding off criticism with the argument that throughout
history those who have upheld Darwinian theory have had an axe to
grind – whether it be to defend male philandering or to propagate the
notion of a genetic elite.

She is also careful not to extrapolate her findings to humans,
pointing out that patterns of homosexuality vary between species. “One
can't draw parallels with humans other than to say that homosexuality
is a regular part of nature and not some pathology,” she says. In
passing, however, she mentions the hijra, an ancient, caste-like group
of transgendered people in India, and traces gender-crossing in
European history from the Cybelean priestesses of the Roman Empire,
through the transvestite saints of the middle ages right back to Joan
of Arc.

Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and
People, by Joan Roughgarden, will be published by University of
California Press.

Quoth :

“…Oh well, I have more rice than you can shake a stick at (what the hell does that mean, anyway?? I can shake a stick at ANYTHING. No, seriously, I'm quite capable. I don't know where all these pussy shit shakers are coming from, or why this stick shaking standard is set based on their clearly inferior abilities, but I have had enough. There exists no such amount at which I cannot shake a stick. SO THERE)…”

Think you'd be happy if you were in the top 1% of income earners in the U.S.? Now consider this: from the world perspective, if you make more than $35,000/year, you're already in the top 1%. You're the filthy rich. Even the “working poor” in the U.S. (defined as families of four making less than $18 K/year) still make more than all but 9% of the world's population.

Read more about what it really means to be poor in Donald Sensings essay: Wealth and poverty in America and the world.

Some of you must think I'm not getting a whole lot of “action” right now.

You may be thinking “Hey, posts so much, I bet that of the 8 or 9 women he's attempted to verbally seduce on the Onion Personals, _not one_ has responded.”

But that's not true. “Don't email me again, weirdo.” is a response.

However, despite the insinuations of some of you sickos, my Julie and Mark post was _not_ a sublimated desire for a little brother-sister action. That's just wrong.

Now, of course, a little [not my] sister-on-sister action is a perfectly healthy expression of human sexuality. And [not my] sister-on-me-on-sister action would be Heaven. Men blow up trade centers for that kind of action.

No, the Julie-on-Mark scenario was a lead-in to a discussion of a whole different question. That is:

Why doesn't everyone immediately agree with me?

I mean, I'm smart, I'm well-read–I know what's going on in the world. Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Highlights for Children–yeah, I've read those. Given my indisputable brilliance, there's only one conclusion:

Everyone who disagrees with me is a friggin' dunderhead. Or quite possibly, evil.

Science suggests that I'm not the only one to arrive at this conclusion. And you can test it out for youself. For example, the next time you get into an argument with some crazed lunatic who thinks that the public schools should be shut down, thereby dooming poor orphans to a life sewing Nikes in a South Central sweatshop, stop for a moment and ask yourself: “What am I thinking?!?” Do you think:

a. Perhaps this person has well-reasoned arguments based on solid evidence. I should pay attention and perhaps revise my beliefs in light of the sensible arguments he's presenting.

b. What a friggin' dunderhead. Gimme a minute and I'll think up the reasons why.

c. Man, I bet he looks damn sexy in a Speedo.

If you consistently answer a), you're a remarkable human being. Maybe not even a human at all, you skin-job. If you answer b), you're human. If you answer c) and most of your cells carry two X chromosomes, you wanna have coffee sometime?

You see, the whole “Julie and Mark” scenario is but one of many questions used by social psychologist Jon Haidt to study moral reasoning. In particular, he was probing the question: “Do people arrive at their beliefs via a process of logical reasoning? Or do they intuitively 'know' what they think, and only think up reasons post-hoc to justify what they already believe?” As the high percentage of you who answered “No, but I can give no rational reason for my belief” in response to the “OK-ness” of Julie and Mark getting it on, you can guess what Haidt's answer to that question would be. (Although it's more nuanced than I've suggested here; people are more open to new evidence and logic when the issue is one about which they don't already have a strong opinion.)

I think I've pimped for Haidt's work before, but a recent post by prompts me to pimp it again: “The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.” (PDF)

The “Julie and Mark” scenario comes from the opening paragraph. The paper itself reviews a bunch of the literature relevant to the question of how we make moral decisions. I'd love to have been a cockroach on the ceiling during some of Haidt's research interviews:

“….Haidt, Koller, and Dias (1993) found evidence for such an intuitionist interpretation. They examined American and Brazilian responses to actions that were offensive yet harmless, such as eating one's dead dog, cleaning one's toilet with the national flag, or eating a chicken carcass one has just used for masturbation. The stories were carefully constructed so that no plausible harm could be found, and most participants stated that nobody was hurt by the actions in question, yet participants still usually said the actions were wrong, and universally wrong. They frequently made statements such as, “It's just wrong to have sex with a chicken.” Furthermore, their affective reactions to the stories (statements that it would bother them to witness the action) were better predictors of their moral judgments than were their claims about harmful consequences….”

Aside from amusing those of us with a 12-year-old's sense of humor, such research has important implications. Namely, you shouldn't waste time arguing with fanatics on the internet. Also, if you're a dogmatic Communist, an anarcho-capitalist, or a strong believer in any particular “ism” you should probably direct the greatest scrutiny at those beliefs about which you feel the greatest moral certainty. If Haidt's research is any guide, you're less likely to attempt to correct errors in those beliefs.

I suggest especially careful scrutiny of any moral beliefs against hot women making sweet love with quality assurance engineers. I mean, those are just wrong.

* Always post a picture. If you don't, we'll assume you outweigh a Bronco's linebacker.

* Never post a picture with more than one female in the photo. How the heck are we supposed to know which one is you?

* Post your weight. Men are shallow. If you're overweight, then why not eliminate those guys for whom it will be an issue immediately? If you don't, see above.

* Never call “collect”. What message are you transmitting?

1) I'm too cheap to pay to contact you.
2) I don't think enough of myself to believe you'll respond, so I'll call collect so if you don't call, I won't waste the credit.

Have you ever indulged in an argument with someone over some contentious, emotional issue, say, whether abortion should be legal, and realized that no matter what the other person said, you would oppose them?

I've long been fascinated by the question “Why do people of seemingly goodwill and high intellect, often disagree so strenuously? Why is there frequently no convergence of opinion?”

I've wondered about the answers to that question because so much misery seems to be caused by people who are so certain of their cause that they're willing to impose it on others, even in the face of enormous evidence that they're wrong. Tens of millions of more people were killed by the Communists than were ever killed by the Nazis. If we're to judge an ideology by the misery it has caused, then Communism has been far worse than Nazism. Yet even now, many still hold a communist society as an ideal to be achieved, despite the horrors that have followed so many attempts to implement communism in practice.

Also, as a proponent of radical social reform myself, how do I know that the reforms that I seek won't result in equal misery? How would I know if it wasn't working?

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/magazine/07HAPPINESS.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=print&position=

September 7, 2003
The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
By JON GERTNER

f Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong. That is to say, if Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong to believe that a new car will make you as happy as you imagine. You are wrong to believe that a new kitchen will make you happy for as long as you imagine. You are wrong to think that you will be more unhappy with a big single setback (a broken wrist, a broken heart) than with a lesser chronic one (a trick knee, a tense marriage). You are wrong to assume that job failure will be crushing. You are wrong to expect that a death in the family will leave you bereft for year upon year, forever and ever. You are even wrong to reckon that a cheeseburger you order in a restaurant — this week, next week, a year from now, it doesn't really matter when — will definitely hit the spot. That's because when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong.

A professor in Harvard's department of psychology, Gilbert likes to tell people that he studies happiness. But it would be more precise to say that Gilbert — along with the psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia, the economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon and the psychologist (and Nobel laureate in economics) Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has taken the lead in studying a specific type of emotional and behavioral prediction. In the past few years, these four men have begun to question the decision-making process that shapes our sense of well-being: how do we predict what will make us happy or unhappy — and then how do we feel after the actual experience? For example, how do we suppose we'll feel if our favorite college football team wins or loses, and then how do we really feel a few days after the game? How do we predict we'll feel about purchasing jewelry, having children, buying a big house or being rich? And then how do we regard the outcomes? According to this small corps of academics, almost all actions — the decision to buy jewelry, have kids, buy the big house or work exhaustively for a fatter paycheck — are based on our predictions of the emotional consequences of these events.

Until recently, this was uncharted territory. How we forecast our feelings, and whether those predictions match our future emotional states, had never been the stuff of laboratory research. But in scores of experiments, Gilbert, Wilson, Kahneman and Loewenstein have made a slew of observations and conclusions that undermine a number of fundamental assumptions: namely, that we humans understand what we want and are adept at improving our well-being — that we are good at maximizing our utility, in the jargon of traditional economics. Further, their work on prediction raises some unsettling and somewhat more personal questions. To understand affective forecasting, as Gilbert has termed these studies, is to wonder if everything you have ever thought about life choices, and about happiness, has been at the least somewhat naive and, at worst, greatly mistaken.

The problem, as Gilbert and company have come to discover, is that we falter when it comes to imagining how we will feel about something in the future. It isn't that we get the big things wrong. We know we will experience visits to Le Cirque and to the periodontist differently; we can accurately predict that we'd rather be stuck in Montauk than in a Midtown elevator. What Gilbert has found, however, is that we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions — our ''affect'' — to future events. In other words, we might believe that a new BMW will make life perfect. But it will almost certainly be less exciting than we anticipated; nor will it excite us for as long as predicted. The vast majority of Gilbert's test participants through the years have consistently made just these sorts of errors both in the laboratory and in real-life situations. And whether Gilbert's subjects were trying to predict how they would feel in the future about a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, the defeat of a preferred political candidate or romantic rejection seemed not to matter. On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.

Gilbert and his collaborator Tim Wilson call the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience the ''impact bias'' — ''impact'' meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ''bias'' our tendency to err. The phrase characterizes how we experience the dimming excitement over not just a BMW but also over any object or event that we presume will make us happy. Would a 20 percent raise or winning the lottery result in a contented life? You may predict it will, but almost surely it won't turn out that way. And a new plasma television? You may have high hopes, but the impact bias suggests that it will almost certainly be less cool, and in a shorter time, than you imagine. Worse, Gilbert has noted that these mistakes of expectation can lead directly to mistakes in choosing what we think will give us pleasure. He calls this ''miswanting.''

''The average person says, 'I know I'll be happier with a Porsche than a Chevy,' '' Gilbert explains. '' 'Or with Linda rather than Rosalyn. Or as a doctor rather than as a plumber.' That seems very clear to people. The problem is, I can't get into medical school or afford the Porsche. So for the average person, the obstacle between them and happiness is actually getting the futures that they desire. But what our research shows — not just ours, but Loewenstein's and Kahneman's — is that the real problem is figuring out which of those futures is going to have the high payoff and is really going to make you happy.

''You know, the Stones said, 'You can't always get what you want,' '' Gilbert adds. ''I don't think that's the problem. The problem is you can't always know what you want.''

Gilbert's papers on affective forecasting began to appear in the late 1990's, but the idea to study happiness and emotional prediction actually came to him on a sunny afternoon in October 1992, just as he and his friend Jonathan Jay Koehler sat down for lunch outside the psychology building at the University of Texas at Austin, where both men were teaching at the time. Gilbert was uninspired about his studies and says he felt despair about his failing marriage. And as he launched into a discussion of his personal life, he swerved to ask why economists focus on the financial aspects of decision making rather than the emotional ones. Koehler recalls, ''Gilbert said something like: 'It all seems so small. It isn't really about money; it's about happiness. Isn't that what everybody wants to know when we make a decision?' '' For a moment, Gilbert forgot his troubles, and two more questions came to him. Do we even know what makes us happy? And if it's difficult to figure out what makes us happy in the moment, how can we predict what will make us happy in the future?

In the early 1990's, for an up-and-coming psychology professor like Gilbert to switch his field of inquiry from how we perceive one another to happiness, as he did that day, was just a hairsbreadth short of bizarre. But Gilbert has always liked questions that lead him somewhere new. Now 45, Gilbert dropped out of high school at 15, hooking into what he calls ''the tail end of the hippie movement'' and hitchhiking aimlessly from town to town with his guitar. He met his wife on the road; she was hitching in the other direction. They married at 17, had a son at 18 and settled down in Denver. ''I pulled weeds, I sold rebar, I sold carpet, I installed carpet, I spent a lot of time as a phone solicitor,'' he recalls. During this period he spent several years turning out science-fiction stories for magazines like Amazing Stories. Thus, in addition to being ''one of the most gifted social psychologists of our age,'' as the psychology writer and professor David G. Myers describes him to me, Gilbert is the author of ''The Essence of Grunk,'' a story about an encounter with a creature made of egg salad that jets around the galaxy in a rocket-powered refrigerator.

Psychology was a matter of happenstance. In the midst of his sci-fi career, Gilbert tried to sign up for a writing course at the local community college, but the class was full; he figured that psych, still accepting registrants, would help him with character development in his fiction. It led instead to an undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado at Denver, then a Ph.D. at Princeton, then an appointment at the University of Texas, then the appointment at Harvard. ''People ask why I study happiness,'' Gilbert says, ''and I say, 'Why study anything else?' It's the holy grail. We're studying the thing that all human action is directed toward.''

One experiment of Gilbert's had students in a photography class at Harvard choose two favorite pictures from among those they had just taken and then relinquish one to the teacher. Some students were told their choices were permanent; others were told they could exchange their prints after several days. As it turned out, those who had time to change their minds were less pleased with their decisions than those whose choices were irrevocable.

Much of Gilbert's research is in this vein. Another recent study asked whether transit riders in Boston who narrowly missed their trains experienced the self-blame that people tend to predict they'll feel in this situation. (They did not.) And a paper waiting to be published, ''The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad,'' examines why we expect that bigger problems will always dwarf minor annoyances. ''When really bad things happen to us, we defend against them,'' Gilbert explains. ''People, of course, predict the exact opposite. If you ask, 'What would you rather have, a broken leg or a trick knee?' they'd probably say, 'Trick knee.' And yet, if your goal is to accumulate maximum happiness over your lifetime, you just made the wrong choice. A trick knee is a bad thing to have.''

All of these studies establish the links between prediction, decision making and well-being. The photography experiment challenges our common assumption that we would be happier with the option to change our minds when in fact we're happier with closure. The transit experiment demonstrates that we tend to err in estimating our regret over missed opportunities. The ''things not so bad'' work shows our failure to imagine how grievously irritations compromise our satisfaction. Our emotional defenses snap into action when it comes to a divorce or a disease but not for lesser problems. We fix the leaky roof on our house, but over the long haul, the broken screen door we never mend adds up to more frustration.

Gilbert does not believe all forecasting mistakes lead to similar results; a death in the family, a new gym membership and a new husband are not the same, but in how they affect our well-being they are similar. ''Our research simply says that whether it's the thing that matters or the thing that doesn't, both of them matter less than you think they will,'' he says. ''Things that happen to you or that you buy or own — as much as you think they make a difference to your happiness, you're wrong by a certain amount. You're overestimating how much of a difference they make. None of them make the difference you think. And that's true of positive and negative events.''

uch of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950's to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ''Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.'' In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ''We don't realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.''

It is easy to overlook something new and crucial in what Wilson is saying. Not that we invariably lose interest in bright and shiny things over time — this is a long-known trait — but that we're generally unable to recognize that we adapt to new circumstances and therefore fail to incorporate this fact into our decisions. So, yes, we will adapt to the BMW and the plasma TV, since we adapt to virtually everything. But Wilson and Gilbert and others have shown that we seem unable to predict that we will adapt. Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event and almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.

As Gilbert points out, this glitch is also significant when it comes to negative events like losing a job or the death of someone we love, in response to which we project a permanently inconsolable future. ''The thing I'm most interested in, that I've spent the most time studying, is our failure to recognize how powerful psychological defenses are once they're activated,'' Gilbert says. ''We've used the metaphor of the 'psychological immune system' — it's just a metaphor, but not a bad one for that system of defenses that helps you feel better when bad things happen. Observers of the human condition since Aristotle have known that people have these defenses. Freud spent his life, and his daughter Anna spent her life, worrying about these defenses. What's surprising is that people don't seem to recognize that they have these defenses, and that these defenses will be triggered by negative events.'' During the course of my interviews with Gilbert, a close friend of his died. ''I am like everyone in thinking, I'll never get over this and life will never be good again,'' he wrote to me in an e-mail message as he planned a trip to Texas for the funeral. ''But because of my work, there is always a voice in the back of my head — a voice that wears a lab coat and has a lot of data tucked under its arm — that says, 'Yes, you will, and yes, it will.' And I know that voice is right.''

Still, the argument that we imperfectly imagine what we want and how we will cope is nevertheless disorienting. On the one hand, it can cast a shadow of regret on some life decisions. Why did I decide that working 100 hours a week to earn more would make me happy? Why did I think retiring to Sun City, Ariz., would please me? On the other hand, it can be enlightening. No wonder this teak patio set hasn't made me as happy as I expected. Even if she dumps me, I'll be O.K. Either way, predicting how things will feel to us over the long term is mystifying. A large body of research on well-being seems to suggest that wealth above middle-class comfort makes little difference to our happiness, for example, or that having children does nothing to improve well-being — even as it drives marital satisfaction dramatically down. We often yearn for a roomy, isolated home (a thing we easily adapt to), when, in fact, it will probably compromise our happiness by distancing us from neighbors. (Social interaction and friendships have been shown to give lasting pleasure.) The big isolated home is what Loewenstein, 48, himself bought. ''I fell into a trap I never should have fallen into,'' he told me.

Loewenstein's office is up a narrow stairway in a hidden corner of an enormous, worn brick building on the edge of the Carnegie-Mellon campus in Pittsburgh. He and Gilbert make for an interesting contrast. Gilbert is garrulous, theatrical, dazzling in his speech and writing; he fills a room. Loewenstein is soft-spoken, given to abstraction and lithe in the way of a hard-core athlete; he seems to float around a room. Both men profess tremendous admiration for the other, and their different disciplines — psychology and economics — have made their overlapping interests in affective forecasting more complementary than fraught. While Gilbert's most notable contribution to affective forecasting is the impact bias, Loewenstein's is something called the ''empathy gap.''

Here's how it expresses itself. In a recent experiment, Loewenstein tried to find out how likely people might be to dance alone to Rick James's ''Super Freak'' in front of a large audience. Many agreed to do so for a certain amount of money a week in advance, only to renege when the day came to take the stage. This sounds like a goof, but it gets at the fundamental difference between how we behave in ''hot'' states (those of anxiety, courage, fear, drug craving, sexual excitation and the like) and ''cold'' states of rational calm. This empathy gap in thought and behavior — we cannot seem to predict how we will behave in a hot state when we are in a cold state — affects happiness in an important but somewhat less consistent way than the impact bias. ''So much of our lives involves making decisions that have consequences for the future,'' Loewenstein says. ''And if our decision making is influenced by these transient emotional and psychological states, then we know we're not making decisions with an eye toward future consequences.'' This may be as simple as an unfortunate proclamation of love in a moment of lust, Loewenstein explains, or something darker, like an act of road rage or of suicide.

Among other things, this line of inquiry has led Loewenstein to collaborate with health experts looking into why people engage in unprotected sex when they would never agree to do so in moments of cool calculation. Data from tests in which volunteers are asked how they would behave in various ''heat of the moment'' situations — whether they would have sex with a minor, for instance, or act forcefully with a partner who asks them to stop — have consistently shown that different states of arousal can alter answers by astonishing margins. ''These kinds of states have the ability to change us so profoundly that we're more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person,'' Loewenstein says.

Part of Loewenstein's curiosity about hot and cold states comes from situations in which his emotions have been pitted against his intellect. When he's not teaching, he treks around the world, making sure to get to Alaska to hike or kayak at least once a year. A scholar of mountaineering literature, he once wrote a paper that examined why climbers have a poor memory for pain and usually ignore turn-back times at great peril. But he has done the same thing himself many times. He almost died in a whitewater canoeing accident and vowed afterward that he never wanted to see his runaway canoe again. (A couple of hours later, he went looking for it.) The same goes for his climbing pursuits. ''You establish your turn-back time, and then you find yourself still far from the peak,'' he says. ''So you push on. You haven't brought enough food or clothes, and then as a result, you're stuck at 13,000 feet, and you have to just sit there and shiver all night without a sleeping bag or warm clothes. When the sun comes up, you're half-frozen, and you say, 'Never again.' Then you get back and immediately start craving getting out again.'' He pushes the point: ''I have tried to train my emotions.'' But he admits that he may make the same mistakes on his next trip.

ould a world without forecasting errors be a better world? Would a life lived without forecasting errors be a richer life? Among the academics who study affective forecasting, there seems little doubt that these sorts of questions will ultimately jump from the academy to the real world. ''If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure,'' Daniel Kahneman says, ''then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.'' To Kahneman, who did some of the first experiments in the area in the early 1990's, affective forecasting could greatly influence retirement planning, for example, where mistakes in prediction (how much we save, how much we spend, how we choose a community we think we'll enjoy) can prove irreversible. He sees a role for affective forecasting in consumer spending, where a ''cooling off'' period might remedy buyer's remorse. Most important, he sees vital applications in health care, especially when it comes to informed consent. ''We consider people capable of giving informed consent once they are told of the objective effects of a treatment,'' Kahneman says. ''But can people anticipate how they and other people will react to a colostomy or to the removal of their vocal cords? The research on affective forecasting suggests that people may have little ability to anticipate their adaptation beyond the early stages.'' Loewenstein, along with his collaborator Dr. Peter Ubel, has done a great deal of work showing that nonpatients overestimate the displeasure of living with the loss of a limb, for instance, or paraplegia. To use affective forecasting to prove that people adapt to serious physical challenges far better and will be happier than they imagine, Loewenstein says, could prove invaluable.

There are downsides to making public policy in light of this research, too. While walking in Pittsburgh one afternoon, Loewenstein tells me that he doesn't see how anybody could study happiness and not find himself leaning left politically; the data make it all too clear that boosting the living standards of those already comfortable, such as through lower taxes, does little to improve their levels of well-being, whereas raising the living standards of the impoverished makes an enormous difference. Nevertheless, he and Gilbert (who once declared in an academic paper, ''Windfalls are better than pratfalls, A's are better than C's, December 25 is better than April 15, and everything is better than a Republican administration'') seem to lean libertarian in regard to pushing any kind of prescriptive agenda. ''We're very, very nervous about overapplying the research,'' Loewenstein says. ''Just because we figure out that X makes people happy and they're choosing Y, we don't want to impose X on them. I have a discomfort with paternalism and with using the results coming out of our field to impose decisions on people.''

Still, Gilbert and Loewenstein can't contain the personal and philosophical questions raised by their work. After talking with both men, I found it hard not to wonder about my own predictions at every turn. At times it seemed like knowing the secret to some parlor trick that was nonetheless very difficult to pull off — when I ogled a new car at the Honda dealership as I waited for a new muffler on my '92 Accord, for instance, or as my daughter's fever spiked one evening and I imagined something terrible, and then something more terrible thereafter. With some difficulty, I could observe my mind overshooting the mark, zooming past accuracy toward the sublime or the tragic. It was tempting to want to try to think about the future more moderately. But it seemed nearly impossible as well.

To Loewenstein, who is especially attendant to the friction between his emotional and deliberative processes, a life without forecasting errors would most likely be a better, happier life. ''If you had a deep understanding of the impact bias and you acted on it, which is not always that easy to do, you would tend to invest your resources in the things that would make you happy,'' he says. This might mean taking more time with friends instead of more time for making money. He also adds that a better understanding of the empathy gap — those hot and cold states we all find ourselves in on frequent occasions — could save people from making regrettable decisions in moments of courage or craving.

Gilbert seems optimistic about using the work in terms of improving ''institutional judgment'' — how we spend health care dollars, for example — but less sanguine about using it to improve our personal judgment. He admits that he has taken some of his research to heart; for instance, his work on what he calls the psychological immune system has led him to believe that he would be able to adapt to even the worst turn of events. In addition, he says that he now takes more chances in life, a fact corroborated in at least one aspect by his research partner Tim Wilson, who says that driving with Gilbert in Boston is a terrifying, white-knuckle experience. ''But I should have learned many more lessons from my research than I actually have,'' Gilbert admits. ''I'm getting married in the spring because this woman is going to make me happy forever, and I know it.'' At this, Gilbert laughs, a sudden, booming laugh that fills his Cambridge office. He seems to find it funny not because it's untrue, but because nothing could be more true. This is how he feels. ''I don't think I want to give up all these motivations,'' he says, ''that belief that there's the good and there's the bad and that this is a contest to try to get one and avoid the other. I don't think I want to learn too much from my research in that sense.''

Even so, Gilbert is currently working on a complex experiment in which he has made affective forecasting errors ''go away.'' In this test, Gilbert's team asks members of Group A to estimate how they'll feel if they receive negative personality feedback. The impact bias kicks in, of course, and they mostly predict they'll feel terrible, when in fact they end up feeling O.K. But if Gilbert shows Group B that others have gotten the same feedback and felt O.K. afterward, then its members predict they'll feel O.K. as well. The impact bias disappears, and the participants in Group B make accurate predictions.

This is exciting to Gilbert. But at the same time, it's not a technique he wants to shape into a self-help book, or one that he even imagines could be practically implemented. ''Hope and fear are enduring features of the human experience,'' he says, ''and it is unlikely that people are going to abandon them anytime soon just because some psychologist told them they should.'' In fact, in his recent writings, he has wondered whether forecasting errors might somehow serve a larger functional purpose he doesn't yet understand. If he could wave a wand tomorrow and eliminate all affective-forecasting errors, I ask, would he? ''The benefits of not making this error would seem to be that you get a little more happiness,'' he says. ''When choosing between two jobs, you wouldn't sweat as much because you'd say: 'You know, I'll be happy in both. I'll adapt to either circumstance pretty well, so there's no use in killing myself for the next week.' But maybe our caricatures of the future — these overinflated assessments of how good or bad things will be — maybe it's these illusory assessments that keep us moving in one direction over the other. Maybe we don't want a society of people who shrug and say, 'It won't really make a difference.'

''Maybe it's important for there to be carrots and sticks in the world, even if they are illusions,'' he adds. ''They keep us moving towards carrots and away from sticks.''

Jon Gertner is a contributing writer for Money magazine.

Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content

http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

Micropayments, small digital payments of between a quarter and a
fraction of a penny, made (yet another) appearance this summer with
Scott McCloud's online comic, The Right Number,
[http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/trn/intro.html]
accompanied by predictions of a rosy future for micropayments.
[http://www.google.com/search?q=mccloud+bitpass].

To read The Right Number, you have to sign up for the BitPass
micropayment system [http://www.bitpass.com/learn/]; once you have an
account, the comic itself costs 25 cents.

BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash,
Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since
Digital Silk Road, [http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html] the paper
that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn't
fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend
towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which
micropayments are a pointless response.

The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is
interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and
future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing
tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large,
user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering
with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that
change — a huge increase the power and reach of the individual
creator.

- Why Micropayment Systems Don't Work

The people pushing micropayments believe that the dollar cost of goods
is the thing most responsible for deflecting readers from buying
content, and that a reduction in price to micropayment levels will
allow creators to begin charging for their work without deflecting
readers.

This strategy doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even
if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental
transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is
worth buying or not, regardless of price.
[http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html] The only business model
that delivers money from sender to receiver with no mental transaction
costs is theft, and in many ways, theft is the unspoken inspiration
for micropayment systems.

Like the “salami slicing” exploit in computer crime,
[http://www.yourwindow.to/information-security/gl_salamislicing.htm]
micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money can be
extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the overall
volume will cause these payments to add up to something significant
for the recipient. But of course the users do notice, because they are
being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs create a
minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by
lowering the dollar cost of goods.

Worse, beneath a certain threshold, mental transaction costs actually
rise, a phenomenon is especially significant for information
goods. It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each
article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a
penny? A newspaper, exposed to the logic of micropayments, becomes
impossible to value.

If you want to feel mental transaction costs in action, sign up for
the $3 version of BitPass, then survey the content on offer.
[http://www.bitpass.com/share/sites/] Would you pay 25 cents to view a
VR panorama of the Matterhorn? Are Powerpoint slides on “Ten reasons
why now is a great time to start a company?” worth a dime? (and if
so, would each individual reason be worth a penny?)

Mental transaction costs help explain the general failure of
micropayment systems. (See Odlyzko
[http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropayments.pdf],
Shirky
[http://oreillynet.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html],
and Szabo
[http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html]
for a fuller accounting of the weaknesses of micropayments.) The
failure of micropayments in turn helps explain the ubiquity of free
content on the Web.

- Fame vs Fortune and Free Content

Analog publishing generates per-unit costs — each book or magazine
requires a certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and
transportation costs. Digital publishing doesn't. Once you have a
computer and internet access, you can post one weblog entry or one
hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand, without paying anything per
post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front costs by the number of
readers means that content gets _cheaper_ as it gets more popular, the
opposite of analog regimes.

The fact that digital content can be distributed for no additional
cost does not explain the huge number of creative people who make
their work available for free. After all, they are still investing
their time without being paid back. Why?

The answer is simple: creators are not publishers, and putting the
power to publish directly into their hands does not make them
publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters
because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do
not. Prior to the internet, this didn't make much difference. The
expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great
for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities — even
vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single
individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a
hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.

This disrupts the old equation of “fame and fortune.” For an author to
be famous, many people had to have read, and therefore paid for, his
or her books. Fortune was a side-effect of attaining fame. Now, with
the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative people
face a dilemma they've never had before: fame vs fortune.

- Substitutability and the Deflection of Use

The fame vs fortune choice matters because of substitutability, the
willingness to accept one thing as a substitute for
another. Substitutability is neutralized in perfect markets. For
example, if someone has even a slight preference for Pepsi over Coke,
and if both are always equally available in all situations, that
person will never drink a Coke, despite being only mildly biased.

The soft-drink market is not perfect, but the Web comes awfully close:
If InstaPundit [http://www.instapundit.com/] and Samizdata
[http://www.samizdata.net/blog/] are both equally easy to get to, the
relative traffic to the sites will always match audience
preference. But were InstaPundit to become less easy to get to,
Samizdata would become a more palatable substitute. Any barrier erodes
the user's preferences, and raises their willingness to substitute one
thing for another.

This is made worse by the asymmetry between the author's motivation
and the reader's. While the author has one particular thing they want
to write, the reader is usually willing to read anything interesting
or relevant to their interests. Though each piece of written material
is unique, the universe of possible choices for any given reader is so
vast that uniqueness is not a rare quality. Thus any barrier to a
particular piece of content (even, as the usability people will tell
you, making it one click further away) will deflect at least some
potential readers.

Charging, of course, creates just such a barrier. The fame vs fortune
problem exists because the web makes it possible to become famous
without needing a publisher, and because any attempt to derive fortune
directly from your potential audience lowers the size of that audience
dramatically, as the added cost encourages them to substitute other,
free sources of content.

- Free is a Stable Strategy

For a creator more interested in attention than income, free makes
sense. In a regime where most of the participants are charging,
freeing your content gives you a competitive advantage. And, as the
drunks say, you can't fall off the floor. Anyone offering content
free gains an advantage that can't be beaten, only matched, because
the competitive answer to free — “I'll pay you to read my weblog!” –
is unsupportable over the long haul.

Free content is thus what biologists call an evolutionarily stable
strategy. It is a strategy that works well when no one else is using
it — it's good to be the only person offering free content. It's also
a strategy that continues to work if everyone is using it, because in
such an environment, anyone who begins charging for their work will be
at a disadvantage. In a world of free content, even the moderate
hassle of micropayments greatly damages user preference, and increases
their willingness to accept free material as a substitute.

Furthermore, the competitive edge of free content is increasing. In
the 90s, as the threat the Web posed to traditional publishers became
obvious, it was widely believed that people would still pay for
filtering. As the sheer volume of free content increased, the thinking
went, finding the good stuff, even if it was free, would be worth
paying for because it would be so hard to find.

In fact, the good stuff is becoming _easier_ to find as the size of
the system grows, not harder, because collaborative filters like
Google and Technorati rely on rich link structure to sort through
links. So offering free content is not just an evolutionary stable
strategy, it is a strategy that improves with time, because the more
free content there is the greater the advantage it has over for-fee
content.

- The Simple Economics of Content

People want to believe in things like micropayments because without a
magic bullet to believe in, they would be left with the uncomfortable
conclusion that what seems to be happening — free content is growing
in both amount and quality — is what's actually happening.

The economics of content creation are in fact fairly simple. The two
critical questions are “Does the support come from the reader, or from
an advertiser, patron, or the creator?” and “Is the support mandatory
or voluntary?”

The internet adds no new possibilities. Instead, it simply shifts both
answers strongly to the right. It makes all user-supported schemes
harder, and all subsidized schemes easier. It likewise makes
collecting fees harder, and soliciting donations easier. And these
effects are multiplicative. The internet makes collecting mandatory
user fees much harder, and makes voluntarily subsidy much easier.

Weblogs, in particular, represent a huge victory for voluntarily
subsidized content. The weblog world is driven by a million creative
people, driven to get the word out, willing to donate their work, and
unhampered by the costs of xeroxing, ink, or postage. Given the choice
of fame vs fortune, many people will prefer a large audience and no
user fees to a small audience and tiny user fees. This is not to say
that creators cannot be paid for their work, merely that mandatory
user fees are far less effective than voluntary donations,
sponsorship, or advertising.

Because information is hard to value in advance, for-fee content will
almost invariably be sold on a subscription basis, rather than per
piece, to smooth out the variability in value. Individual bits of
content that are even moderately close in quality to what is available
free, but wrapped in the mental transaction costs of micropayments,
are doomed to be both obscure and unprofitable.

- What's Next?

This change in the direction of free content is strongest for the work
of individual creators, because an individual can produce material on
any schedule they like. It is also strongest for publication of words
and images, because these are the techniques most easily mastered by
individuals. As creative work in groups creates a good deal of
organizational hassle and often requires a particular mix of
talents, it remains to be seen how strongly the movement towards free
content will be for endeavors like music or film.

However, the trends are towards easier collaboration, and still more
power to the individual. The open source movement has demonstrated
that even phenomenally complex systems like Linux can be developed
through distributed volunteer labor, and software like Apple's iMovie
allows individuals to do work that once required a team. So while we
don't know what ultimate effect the economics of free content will be
on group work, we do know that the barriers to such free content are
coming down, as they did with print and images when the Web launched.

The interesting questions regarding free content, in other words, have
nothing to do with bland “End of Free” predictions, or unimaginative
attempts at restoring user-pays regimes. The interesting questions are
how far the power of the creator to publish their own work is going to
go, how much those changes will be mirrored in group work, and how
much better collaborative filters will become in locating freely
offered material. While we don't know what the end state of these
changes will be, we do know that the shift in publishing power is
epochal and accelerating.

-=-

* Notes ==============================================================

– historyflow: Software from IBM

Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, in IBM's Collaborative User
Experience lab have created a tool called historyflow that lets you
see the history of a wiki page. They turned the tool loose on the
wikipedia.org, the collaborative encyclopedia project, and the
history flow site has many of their observations on observed
patterns for the formation of encyclopedia entries on contentious
subjects like Abortionh or Islam.

Its an astonishing X-ray of long-term social patterns in action, and
because its so visual, it is hard to describe in an acsii-only
format, so I'll point you to the site, and to my longer (and
picture-strewn) observations elsewhere.

historyflow: http://www.research.ibm.com/history/
My more detailed observations about historyflow:

http://www.corante.com/many/20030801.shtml#49472

– Danah Boyd on Friendster

Friendster, the social networking service, has been causing a lot of
stir recently with its new “no fakes” policy. The site, a kind of
“sixdegrees with dating” affair that has grown like wildfire among
the under-30 set, had been home to a number of amusing but fictional
users, including Jesus, the City of San Francisco, Pure Evil, and a
Giant Squid.

These fakesters were both amusing and effective — two people who
listed the City of San Francisco as a friend would then be connected
through this shared affinity.

However, Jon Abrams, the Friendster CEO, disliked the Fakesters, as
he felt they trivialized the site, and began to weed out the fake
profiles, creating an immediate and public backlash.

The fight between users who used the site to create something
valuable to them and the community owner who wanted a more placid
group of users is an old old story, but like many old stories, its
still interesting to see how it plays out. The backlash is going on
as I write, and no one is doing a beter job of covering it from
various angles than Danah Boyd, who has runs a weblog called
connected selves, on social networking services:

http://www.zephoria.org/snt/

– Club Nexus

HP researchers Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, and Eytan Adar
wrote a paper about social clustering in Club Nexus, a service for
Stanford University's online population.

Because Club Nexus users left such a rich metadata trail, they were
able to test a number of assertions about social congres that had
previously been made only as generalities. In addition to uncovering
the expected gross patterns (power laws, clustering, small worlds
networks, low hop-counts between people, etc), they were able to
make refined observations about what sorts of affinities correlate
with high clustering (the higher the listed ratio is above 1, the
stronger the correlation with social clustering):

We found further that, in general, activities or interests that
are shared by a smaller subset of people showed stronger
association ratios than very generic activities or interests that
could be enjoyed by many. For example, raving (1.64), ballroom
dancing (1.61), and Latin dancing (1.49) showed stronger
association in the social activity category than barbecuing
(1.20), partying (1.18), or camping (1.11) [...]

In sports in particular, multi-player team or niche sports were
better predictors of social contacts than sports that could be
pursued individually or casually. Among water sports, synchronized
swimming, diving, crew, and wake boarding were better predictors
than boating, fishing, swimming or windsurfing. In the land sports
category, team sports, in particular women's team sports such as
lacrosse and field hockey were better predictors than soccer
(often played casually as opposed to in a competitive college
team), tennis, or racquetball. [...]

We observed that niche book, movie, and music genres were more
predictive of friendship than generic ones. Gay and lesbian books,
read by 63 users, had a ratio of 4.37, followed by professional
and technical, teen, and computer books. In contrast, the general
category of 'fiction & literature' had a ratio of 1.09.

Well worth a read:

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_6/adamic/index.html

– ETech CFP

O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference is happening in February,
and the Call for Papers is up now. The topics are:

Interfaces and Services – Sherlock, Watson, and Dashboard;
micro-content viewers and RSS; laptop, palmtop, hiptop, and
cellphone interfaces; web services.

Social Software – Software for describing and exploring social
connections, FOAF (friend-of-a-friend networks), Flash Mobs,
MeetUp, and related applications.

Untethered – WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular networks; Rendezvous,
SMS, and ad hoc networking; Symbian and J2ME mobile development
environments.

Location – GPS/GIS technologies and devices, location based
services, navigational devices, geospacial annotation tools, and
visualization software.

Hardware – Hardware hacks and mobile devices, sensor arrays, RFID
tags, TinyOS, and sub-micro computing.

Business Models – Who is putting a stake in the ground and
attempting to build the new applications, network, and online
culture — and how are they doing it?

You can submit a conference or tutorial proposal here:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/create/e_sess

– T-Mobile and Starbucks Don't Get Wifi

More proof, as if any were needed, that the economics of Wifi are
interfering with plans to offer metered commercial access. I have a
T-Mobile Wifi account, 300 mins for $50, so that when I'm away from
free APs, I can at least drop into a Starbucks, order up a doppio,
and check my mail.

Today, T-Mobile informed me when I logged in that that deal was
over, dead, forget it, they're sorry they ever mentioned it.
Instead, they were offering me a “convenient” Day-Pass, for the low,
low rate of $10/24 hour period. Meaning, of course, that if you
spend even as much as an hour logged in at a Starbucks, the cost per
minute has almost tripled, to 16 cents a minute from 6. Worse, if
you just want to go in, grab a cup of coffee and check your mail
under the old “10 minute minimum” regime, that will now cost a
dollar a minute. I could have elective surgery for a dollar a
minute.

This is Iridium or those back-of-the-seat airphones all over
again. Any pricing plan that is even moderately convenient shows up
on the spreadsheets at HQ as being less than a rocket ride to
riches, so they come up with the two-fisted brainstorm of making it
less convenient to use, then slapping a “Now with new expensiveness!”
sticker on it. I smell a business school case study in the making –
don't take products with vanishingly small marginal cost and make
them too expensive for your target audience to want to use.

* End ====================================================================

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform
the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit.

To view a copy of this license, visit

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0

or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

2003, Clay Shirky

http://www.westwind.com/reference/OS-X/background-processes.html

Mac OS X: What Are All Those Processes?
A short list of background processes and daemons

By Gordon Davisson

Copyright (c) 2002, Westwind Computing inc.

Mac OS X (like any unixish OS) always has a number of things going on in the background — processes that take care of business behind the scenes. Normally, you won't even notice them, unless you use something like ProcessViewer or the ps or top commands to look at the process list. If you do notice them, you may wonder what on earth they're all there for. This list is here to answer that question.

System Processes (mostly owned by root):
Process Its function
AppleFileServer The personal file sharing (AFP over IP) server. It should only be present if file sharing is enabled (in the System Preferences' Sharing pane).
autodiskmount Responsible for mounting removable media.
automount Automatically mounts and unmounts network (NFS and AFP) file systems as they are accessed / left idle.
configd Maintains dynamic configuration information about the computer and its environment (e.g. network).
CrashReporter Logs information about program crashes. It can be configured (via editing /etc/hostconfig in OS X 10.0, and the Console utility's preferences on OS X 10.1) to log crashes in ~/Library/Logs.
cron Runs various scheduled programs and scripts, mostly to perform perodic maintenance on the computer. Note: in Mac OS X version 10.0, this is set to run system maintenance late at night; if the computer is turned off every night, the maintenance may never get done. Either leave the computer on overnight occaisionally, or use something like Brian R. Hill's program MacJanitor to perform maintenance manually.
DesktopDB Keeps track of information on currently known applications and their document types. Used by the Finder to associate documents with the appropriate application.
dynamic_pager Assists the kernel with managing swap files for virtual memory.
ftpd Handles incoming FTP (File Transfer Protocol) connections. This process is created dynamically by inetd, so it should only appear when someone is actually connected to your computer.
httpd This is Apache, the web server that ships with OS X. It should only be present if web sharing is enabled (in the System Preferences' Sharing pane). It is normal for there to be several of these running, one owned by root, the rest by www.
init The master of the computer from the BSD/unix point of view. This is responsible for creating and looking after many of the other background processes.
inetd Responsible for starting and looking after some internet services (mainly FTP and telnet) provided by this computer. As of version 10.2 this was functionally replaced by xinetd, but is kept around for compatibility.
ipconfigd Automatically configures the network (with some help from configd).
kextd Responsible for loading and unloading kernel extensions (e.g. device drivers) as they are needed.
lookupd Handles looking up information from network information services such as NetInfo and DNS.
mach_init The Mach kernel's bootstrap port server. This is the first process created during bootup, and creates the BSD init process (which then creates everything else).
mDNSResponder The multicast DNS (a component of Rendezvous) responder; this advertises network services (such as AFP file sharing) provided by this computer.
netinfod Serves out NetInfo data. There will be one of these processes for each NetInfo domain served from the computer (normally just one, for the local domain). ProcessViewer won't tell you which daemon process serves which NetInfo domain, but the ps command will.
nfsiod Services asynchronous requests to an NFS server. It is normal for there to be several of these.
nibindd Finds, creates, and destroys NetInfo servers.
ntpd Synchronizes the Mac's clock with network time servers.
pitond The Retrospect backup client (only present if you've installed Retrospect).
portmap Dynamically assigns RPC (network Remote Procedure Call) services (such as NetInfo and NFS) to TCP/UDP ports.
slpd The Service Location Protocol (SLP) responder; this advertises network services (such as AFP file sharing) provided by this computer.
slpdLoad This process frequently shows up as a Zombie in ProcessViewer's listing (with semirandom owner, parent, and statistics). Don't worry, it's harmless, just a little confused.
(More technically: a zombie process is one that has finished (i.e. died), but whose parent process has not received notification of its death. In order to keep process information around until the parent process is notified, the zombie's entry is left in the process table even though the process itself is gone. A bit morbid, perhaps, but since it doesn't consume resources, it's not really a problem.)
sshd The secure shell server — listens for and handles incoming SSH (encrypted remote login) connections. It was added in version 10.0.1 and should only be present if “Allow remote login” is enabled (in the System Preferences' Sharing pane).
syslogd Logs and/or dispatches system status and error messages.
telnetd Handles incoming telnet (remote login) connections. It's enabled by the “Allow remote login” option in the System Preferences' Sharing pane of Mac OS X 10.0; in later versions it's disbled, and SSH is used instead (although telnetd can be reenabled manually by editing the /etc/inetd.conf file). This process is created dynamically by inetd, so it should only appear when someone is actually telnetted into your computer.
update Responsible for keeping disks synchronized with the file system cache, to keep data loss to a minimum in case of a crash.
xinetd Responsible for starting and looking after some internet services (mainly FTP and telnet) provided by this computer. This is essentially an extended version of inetd.
User processes (owned by the current user):
Process Its function
ATSServer The Apple Type Solution Server; responsible for managing the available fonts and making them available to applications.
Dock Maintains and displays the Dock.
DocklingServer Keeps docklings' status and displays up to date.
Finder The Finder.
hdid Handles mounted disk image (.img and .dmg) files.
LaunchCFMApp Applications in the old-style Macintosh format (Code Fragment Manager format, aka CFM, aka PEF) will show up in Process Viewer under this name. LaunchCFMApp is actually a wrapper program provided for compatibility with this old application format; Process Viewer just can't see through the wrapper to the actual application inside.
(Note: the distinction between the old (CFM) and new (mach-o) formats is not the same as the distinction betweem the old (Carbon) and new (Cocoa) application environments. Many of the Carbon apps you're likely to run into on OS X are in mach-o format.)
loginwindow This is only partly a user process — it starts before anyone logs into the computer, and is responsible for displaying the login screen (or not, if autologin is set), validating login attempts, and setting up the user environment (launching the Finder, Dock, any login apps, etc) at login. It also acts as a process monitor for user processes, restarts the Finder or Dock if they crash, and implements the Force Quit Applications window. Finally, it handles the logout, restart, and shutdown procedures.
pbs The pasteboard server; analogous to the clipboard under Mac OS 9.
SystemUIServer (OS X 10.1 and later)
Maintains the Menu Items in the right end of the menu bar.
TruBlueEnvironme The Classic (OS 9.1 compatibility) environment. This single process includes OS 9.1 and all running classic applications. The name derives from an early Apple code-name for the Classic environment: “the Blue Box”.
Window Manager Responsible for managing the computer's display and mediating between the various Applications and other processes that want to display information on it.
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