geek2geek

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…

Please go on!

Are you sitting down? Good, then let’s begin.

There is something wrong with our preferred communications technologies (email, IM, IRC, blogs, web forums, SMS…) and it is this:

text lacks empathy

More accurately, text lacks secondary channels to communicate emotion but you can’t put that on a t-shirt.

Speaking with someone face to face has many lines of communication. First, there are the actual words. This is the text of the conversation but it is certainly not the whole of the meaning.

There’s the tone and inflection, how each word is spoken and where the stresses are placed. Let’s lump that all together into the audio component. Body and hand gestures add more emphasis and emotion even filling in gaps in the text. (How do you get an Italian to shut up? Handcuff them.) Eye contact conveys interest (hey baby). Fidgeting conveys nervousness (and perhaps interest as well). And then there’s the whole range of facial expressions.

Text contains none of this. You just get the words stripped of all the implied emotions we’re used to.

That’s my observation. Next we’ll look at the consequences.

It’s been almost half a year since I set up this blog and a mailing list to discuss geek2geek communications. Geeks communicating with other geeks and also mere humans. The subject got a lot of attention at OSCON and BarCampBlock. As these things go, I never got around to writing things up. Well, it’s a new year so let’s get things started.

Of course, where to start. I’ve been having trouble with that, everything’s so interconnected. So I’ll begin at the beginning, where the idea came from.

For the non-programmers out there, I promise it’s not going to be all about programming but you might have to indulge me my coding metaphors while I get to the point.

This all started when I was preparing for my big OSCON tutorial last year, the ambiguously titled “Simple Ways To Be A Better Programmer” aka “What Works in Software Development” aka (my favorite) “How To Be Lazy Without Really Trying”. This is a tutorial I’ve given many times before for many years. It’s my opportunity to have 200 programmers captive while I brainwash them for 3 hours. The title is clever and vague so they don’t know what they’re getting into. Usually I teach whatever it is I think programmers are struggling with that year. Particularly things they don’t teach you in college. Not that I’d know, I failed out.

Usually it focuses on things like version control, documentation, names, testing, refactoring and so forth. Mostly coding issues. This year I proposed the same basic thing as always but it didn’t get me terribly excited. Then right after it was accepted I got a much better idea. Typical. As with all good things, the idea came from my kitchen.

Alton Brown’s show Good Eats could be instead titled Analytical Cooking. (If you hate cooking shows, watch this one.) He breaks down cooking into methodologies and techniques, rather than a series of recipes you’re supposed to follow by rote and guesswork. The cookbook associated with the show, really more of a cooking textbook then a traditional list of recipes, is I’m Just Here For The Food. Emblazoned on the cover is a simple equation that sums his grand philosophy:

food + heat = cooking

He breaks down cooking not by dish but by heating method and focuses his efforts on teaching them.

It’s simple and poignant. Where do I get one of those?

Where indeed? The answer is provided…

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