geek2geek

Tags:empathy, feedback, problem, solution, void, Warnocks Dilemma

Before I continue on with my grand dissertation on empathy, I would like to take a moment to talk to you about a problem which is currently very near and dear to my heart as a first time bloggeristo: Warnock’s Dilemma.

Has this happened to you? With much excitement you post up your fantastic idea that will OBVIOUSLY change the world and make everyone rich and smell nice and create world peace while still leaving a place for violent video games. And then you wait… and wait… and wait… and no response. Nobody says anything. At this point you are caught in Warnock’s Dilemma.

Named for Bryan Warnock who first fully expressed the dilemma in the early days of the design of Perl 6 — oh god was that EIGHT YEARS AGO?! — the dilemma is how do you interpret a lack of response? Bryan identified five possibilities…

1. Your post is so brilliant and obvious that it requires no response other than “good idea”.
This is the optimist’s interpretation: The glass I cannot see is half full… with 20 year single malt scotch.

2. It’s complete drivel and not even worth the energy to say so.
The pessimist: The glass I cannot see must be empty and chipped.

3. Nobody cares.
Your post was irrelevant to your readers, they don’t drink.

4. Nobody understood it, but they’re not asking for clarification.
Your readers are wondering what the difference is between scotch and whiskey and single malt vs blend but nobody wants to look like an idiot by asking.

5. Nobody read it.
The glass is broken. Maybe it never got there. Maybe they saw the title of the post and it didn’t interest them. Maybe it looked long and they tl;dr‘d. For whatever reason, nobody had the opportunity to see your message. Bryan expressed this best: “All those not present say ‘aye’.”

Or maybe some combination, after all, you have more than one reader (or maybe you don’t, how sad).

Missing of implicit communication

This is a fairly common problem with online communications. What’s gone wrong here? To find out, let’s imagine how this sort of thing might play out in the Real World… maybe you’re giving a lecture, maybe you’re just pontificating to your friends in a coffee shop or talking on the phone or in a meeting. The real world has lots of extra channels of communication and we’re often not aware that we’re communicating them.

For example, here we see a woman expressing disinterest in what her teacher has to say. She’s not conscious of her choice to do so (or of much else) and yet the message is conveyed probably followed by a well-thrown eraser.

Here is dha conveying polite interest in the conversation going on across the table from him. dha’s choice of expression is, at some level, chosen but he doesn’t have to put much effort into it.

Text has one band (and it’s Lawrence Welk’s Orchestra!)

What’s different about the real world than text? For one, neither of them need say anything to express their reaction. It’s all done visually (maybe it contains an auditory component, such as snoring), not verbally. Communication is focused and out of band. One can express themselves to the speaker without interrupting the them or distracting the rest of the audience. This is possible because the real world has so many different ways to communicate built right in. If someone’s talking, taking up the omnidirectional audio band, you can instead use the more directional visual band with facial expressions.

Text has just one band built in, text. It’s roughly equivalent to the voice component of the real word, but with all expressiveness stripped out. With the one band being shared and viewed by everyone, expressing (dis)interest now requires either interrupting the speaker or (in the case of mailing lists and web forums) broadcasting your view to the entire audience.

ME, TOO!

Because forum and mailing list feedback tends to be omnidirectional, there’s a stigma against “frivolous” posts. This solidified on that black September in 1993 when AOL gave all its members free Usenet access. Somebody would post that they had a useful file (this was before the days when everyone had their own web server or even before HTTP existed) only to be followed with a chorus of AOLers and college freshmen replying “Could you send me a copy?” “I’d like a copy!” “ME TOO!!!”

Similarly, your “hey, I liked your post” message must be read by (and discarded by) the entire audience. It rapidly gets annoying especially when a chorus of simple “I liked it too” drowns out meaningful discussion. Text must have a way to allow the reader to express themselves back to the author without having to broadcast. Directional, focused communication.

One obvious means available to email lists is to simply reply directly to the author, but this is perhaps now too private. If, for example, the author was trying to build consensus then only he can see it occurring. Furthermore, humans are in many ways heard animals and often won’t go out on a limb in public no matter how low to the ground it is. One person publicly expressing “I like it” allows another, and another and another to express themselves.

Textual feedback is explicit.

In the real world, expressions of interest just happen. They’re part of the listening process we don’t even think about. We even “listen” when we read, frowning at book or perhaps you’re reading this blog post with an expression something like just having drank some slightly off milk when you were expecting orange juice. Conversing with the “speaker” is so natural we do it even when we know they cannot hear us. And yet, it seems to fulfill our need to give feedback. So much so that we forget that the author never got it.

Text has a continual uphill battle against this tendency. It’s not limited to text, it’s inherent in anything where one must consciously initiate the feedback process, be it making a phone call or emailing a web site to tell them their shit is broke or sending a thank you note or yelling at the guy behind the counter. But that’s another show post.

Ok, brainiac, how do we fix it?

Textual communication is missing two key elements that we rely on to get feedback in the real world.

1. Multiple bands of silent communication
2. Built in behavior

Which is to say it’s…

1. Quiet (yet still public)
2. Easy

How do we make feedback quiet and easy?

When in doubt, look at what Debian is doing.

Debian (who maybe got it from Apache, or vice-versa) has an informal form of mailing list voting. If they like a post they reply with +1. Don’t like it? -1. Others use ++ and –, even fractions. One could throw in ? to mean “I don’t get it”. You can even get clever and say things like 1 + i (this is only a good idea in your imagination). Apache has rules and even say what happens when no one replies, thus breaking the Dilemma. The simple, yet defined, feedback conventions make it easy to express your likes and dislikes without any thought as to how to craft your response or whether you’re going to be yelled at for posting a “me too”.

This is all more than you probably need, +1 and -1 will do it, but there is one critical thing you must do before you start using this method! And it’s the one thing everyone forgets. You must explain what +1 and -1 mean! All too often folks just start replying with +1 and -1, some get it and some don’t. Ironically, many won’t ask thus starting the Dilemma all over again.

Web sites, being more than just text, have a few more options. The most common way to break Warnock’s Dilemma that’s been stumbled upon in recent years is the ubiquitous vote up/down button. Because it’s just asking you a simple, binary question it requires little thought and thus has a good chance of getting a clear answer from a wide variety of folks. The results are public, so you get the pile on benefits.

The big innovation in recent years has been to implement it so you can vote without leaving the page. This is the final piece of the puzzle, leaving feedback on a web site is now out of band and does not interrupt your continued reading.

Information Voids

Warnock’s Dilemma is a specific form of the more general problem of a information void and how, one way or another, it will be filled. If it’s not filled by useful information we’ll tend to go ahead and make something up. Rather than using logic we’ll often fill it using emotions. But that’s another post.

After all that, I hope you’ll notice I added in one of those widgets myself. Please feel free to express yourself, so far my imaginary glass holds no scotch. For extra emphasis, use a vicious stabbing/twisting motion when pressing the “down” button and pretend you’re stabbing a pen through my ear.

Oh, and if you did have an expression on your face like drinking milk when you expected orange juice I’d love to see it.