Oddly Influenced

E52: Emotions as concepts

Brian Marick — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 13:34:45 -0500

An elaboration on episode 49's description of the brain as a prediction engine, focusing on a theory of what emotions are, how they're learned, and how emotional experiences are constructed. Emotions like anger and fear turn out to be not that different from concepts like money or bicycle, except that the brain attends more to internal sensations than to external perceptions.

If the predictive brain theory is true, the brain is stranger than we imagine; perhaps stranger than we can imagine.

Main sources

Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017.
Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, 2024.

Other sources

"... Chemero’s approach in his book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (episode 43)..."
"... Clark suggests something like this in his 1997 book, Being There, covered in the unnumbered episode just before episode 41..."
"... Remember how, last episode, I distinctly remember driving seated on the left side of the car while in Ireland..."
George A Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information,” 1956. ("... replicating an experiment from 1949...")

Credits

Picture of the University of Illinois Auditorium is from Vince Smith and is licensed CC BY 2.0. It was cropped.

E51: Constructed memories (a nugget)

Brian Marick — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 17:11:18 -0500

Memories appear to be constructed by plugging together stored templates. Do concepts operate the same way?

Sources

Suzi Travis, "False Memories are Exactly What You Need", 2024.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.

Credits

Image of street warning from Dublin, Ireland, via Flickr user tunnelblick. Licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

E50: the preferred level of abstraction (a nugget)

Brian Marick — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:27:23 -0500

We see a creature near us, and we describe it as a dog. Why that and not "mammal" or "animal"? And if that dog's a Springer Spaniel, and we know it's a Springer Spaniel, why do we nevertheless call it a "dog"?

In an apparent digression, I discuss the idea in cognitive science of a "basic level of categorization" (or abstraction). While we construct hierarchies and taxonomies, we tend to operate at one specific level: one that's not too abstract and not too concrete.

Sources

George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, 1987.
Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, 2002.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2024.

Credits

The image of the dog and cat is via https://fondosymas.blogspot.com. It is licensed as Reconocimiento-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 3.0 España.

E49: Metaphors and the predictive brain

Brian Marick — Mon, 19 May 2025 22:11:41 -0500

It's fairly pointless to analyze metaphors in isolation. They're used in a cumulative way as part of real or imagined conversations. That meshes with a newish way of understanding the brain: as largely a prediction engine. If that's true, what would it mean for metaphorical names in code?

Sources
* Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017. (I also read her How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017) but found the lack of detail frustrating.)
* Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997.

Credits
Image of a glider under tow from zenithair.net.

E48: Multiple metaphors

Brian Marick — Fri, 16 May 2025 10:05:57 -0500

When we name a class name `Invoice`, are we communicating or thinking metaphorically? I used to think we were; now I think we aren't. This episode explains one reason: ordinary conversation frequently uses multiple metaphors when talking about some concept. Sometimes we even mix inconsistent or contradictory metaphors within the same sentence. That's not the way we use metaphorical names in programming.

Sources

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980. (I worked from the first edition; there is a second edition I haven't read.)
Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.

Credits

Picture of cats-eye marbles from Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.

E47: Oops! The Winston W. Royce Story

Brian Marick — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 07:40:00 -0500

In 1970, Winston W. Royce published a paper “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems.” Later authors cited it as the justification for what had come to be called the "waterfall process." Yet Royce had quite specifically described that process as one that is "simplistic" and "invites failure."

That's weird. People not only promoted a process Royce had said was inadequate, they cited him as their justification. And they ignored all the elaborations that he said would make the inadequate process adequate.

What's up with that? In this episode, I blame metaphor and the perverse affordances of diagrams.

I also suggest ways you might use metaphors and node-and-arrow diagrams in a way that avoids Royce's horrible fate.

In addition to the usual transcript, there's also a Wiki version.

Other sources

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980.
Laurent Bossavit, The Leprechauns of Software Engineering, 2014.
George A Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information,” 1956.

Credits

Dawn Marick for the picture of the fish ladder. Used with permission.

E46: How do metaphors work?

Brian Marick — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 04:00:00 -0600

Conceptual metaphor is a theory in cognitive science that claims understanding and problem-solving often (but not always) happen via systems of metaphor. I present the case for it, and also expand on the theory in the light of previous episodes on ecological and embodied cognition.

This episode is theory. The next episode will cover practice.

This is the beginning of a series roughly organized around ways of discovering where your thinking has gone astray, with an undercurrent of how techniques of literary criticism might be applied to software documents (including code).

Books I drew upon

Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (2/e), 1993 (four essays in particular: see the transcript).
Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980. (I worked from the first edition; there is a second edition I haven't read.)

Two of the Metaphor and Thought essays have PDFified photocopies available:

Reddy's "The Conduit Metaphor – A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language"
Lakoff's "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor"

Other things I referred to

Helper T cells
Richard P. Gabriel's website
"Dead" metaphors
The history of "balls to the wall"

Credits

The image of an old throttle assembly is due to WordOrigins.org.

E45: The offloaded brain, part 5: I propose a software design style

Brian Marick — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 07:09:00 -0600

In this episode, I ask the question: what would a software design style inspired by ecological and embodied cognition be like? I sketch some tentative ideas. I plan to explore this further at nh.oddly-influenced.dev, a blog that will document an app I'm beginning to write.

In my implementation, I plan to use Erlang-style "processes" (actors) as the core building block. Many software design heuristics are (implicitly) intended to avoid turning the app into a Big Ball of Mud. Evolution is not "interested" in the future, but rather in how to add new behaviors while minimizing their metabolic cost. That's similar to, but not the same as, "Big O" efficiency, perhaps because the constant factors dominate.

The question I'd like to explore is: what would be a design style that accommodates both my need to have a feeling of intellectual control and looks toward biological plausibility to make design, refactoring, and structuring decisions?

Sources

Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997
Ray Naylor, The Mountain in the Sea, 2022
Erlang processes (explained using Elixir syntax)

Mentioned

Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder, "Big Ball of Mud", 1999
Tetris
Illinois
New Hampshire

Prior work
What I'm wanting to do is something like what the more extreme of the Extreme Programmers did. I'm thinking of Keith Braithwaite’s “test-driven design as if you meant it” (also, also, also) or Corey Haines’s “Global Day of Code Retreat” exercises (also). I mentioned those in early versions of this episode's script. They got cut, but I feel bad that I didn't acknowledge prior work.

Credits
The image is an Ophanim. These entities (note the eyes) were seen by the prophet Ezekiel. They are popularly considered to be angels or something like them, and they're why the phrase "wheels within wheels" is popular. I used the phrase when describing neural activation patterns that are nested within other patterns. The image was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons and was created by user RootOfAllLight, CC BY-SA 4.0.

E44: The offloaded brain, part 4: an interview with David Chapman

Brian Marick — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 08:35:43 -0600

In the '80s, David Chapman and Phil Agre were doing work within AI that was very compatible with the ecological and embodied cognition approach I've been describing. They produced a program, Pengi, that played a video game well enough (given the technology of the time) even though it had nothing like an internal representation of the game board and barely any persistent state at all. In this interview, David describes the source of their crazy ideas and how Pengi worked.

Pengi is more radically minimalist than what I've been thinking of as ecologically-inspired software design, so it makes a good introduction to the next episode.

Sources

Philip E. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 1997, contains a description of Pengi, but is much more about the motivation behind it and also a discussion of "critical technical practice" that I think is nicely compatible with Schön's "reflective practice". I intend to cover both eventually.
Philip E. Agre and David Chapman, "Pengi: An implementation of a theory of activity", 1987

Chapman links

Meaningness.com (including greatest hits)
I found his ideas about Vajrayana Buddhism intriguing

Other

A recording of a Pengo game
The foundational text of ethnomethodology is notoriously (and, some – waves – think, gratuitously) opaque. I found Heritage's Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology far more readable. I've enjoyed the Em does Ca (conversational analysis) Youtube series. The episode on turn-construction units hits me where I live. She talks about how people know when, in a conversation, they're allowed to talk. I'm mildly bad at that in person. I'm somewhat worse when talking to a single person over video. I'm horrible at it when on a multiple-person conference call, with or without postage-stamp-sized video images of faces.

Credits

The Pengo image is by Arcade Addiction. Retrieved from Wikipedia. Fair use.

E43: The offloaded brain, part 3: dynamical systems

Brian Marick — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 07:30:00 -0600

Scientists studying ecological and embodied cognition try to use algorithms as little as they can. Instead, they favor dynamical systems, typically represented as a set of equations that share variables in a way that is somewhat looplike: component A changes, which changes component B, which changes component A, and so on. Peculiarities of behavior can be explained as such systems reaching stable states. This episode describes two sets of equations that predict surprising properties of what seems to be intelligent behavior.

Source:

Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011

Either mentioned or came this close to being mentioned

James Clerk Maxwell, "On Governors", 1868 (PDF)
Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Embodied Cognition", 2020
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Computational Theory of Mind", 2021
Wikipedia, "Dynamical Systems Theory"
Nick Bostrom, "Letter from Utopia", 2008/20

Credits

The image is from Maxwell's "On Governors", showing the sort of equations "EEs" work with instead of code.

E42: The offloaded brain, part 2: applications

Brian Marick — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 07:05:00 -0500

Suppose you believed that the ecological/embodied cognitive scientists of last episode had a better grasp on cognition than does our habitual position that the brain is a computer, passively perceiving the environment, then directing the body to perform steps in calculated plans. If so, technical practices like test-driven design, refactoring in response to "code smells," and the early-this-century fad for physical 3x5 cards might make more sense. I explain how. I also sketch how people might use such ideas when designing their workplace and workflow.

Books I drew upon

Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997
Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 2005

Also mentioned

Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, 1998
I mentioned a session of the Simple Design and Test conference.
The sociology book I contributed to: The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, 2009, edited by Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik. My chapter, "A Manglish Way of Working: Agile Software Development", is inexplicably available without a paywall.
The MIT AI Lab Jargon File
I believe the original publication about CRC cards is Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham, "A laboratory for teaching object oriented thinking", 1989. I also believe the first book-type description was in Rebecca Wirfs-Brock et. al., Designing Object-Oriented Software, 1990.
The idea of "flow" was first popularized in Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's 1990 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
The idea of the hedgehog and the fox was popularized by Isaiah Berlin in his 1953 book The Hedgehog and the Fox (a wikipedia link).
The original developer of the Pomodoro technique describes it here. There was a book about it, but Goodreads has been sufficiently enshittified that I can't find it. Perhaps you might be interested in Reduce PTSD and Depression Symptoms in 21 Days Using the Pomodoro Method instead? Because Goodreads prefers that.
The Boy Who Cried World (wikipedia)

Credits

I was helped by Steve Doubleday, Ron Jeffries, and Ted M. Young.

I took the picture of Dawn in the tango close embrace.

E41: The offloaded brain, part 1: behavior

Brian Marick — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:13:00 -0500

Embodied or Ecological Cognition is an offshoot of cognitive science that rejects or minimizes one of its axioms: that the computer is a good analogy for the brain. That is, that the brain receives inputs from the senses; computes with that input as well as with goals, plans, and stored representations of the world; issues instructions to the body; and GOTO PERCEPTION. The offshoot gives a larger causal role to the environment and the body, and a lesser role to the brain. Why store instructions in the brain if the arrangement of body-in-environment can be used to make it automatic?

This episode contains explanations of fairly unintelligent behavior. Using them, I fancifully extract five design rules that a designer-of-animals might have used. In the next episode, I'll apply those rules to workplace and process design. In the final episode, I'll address what the offshoot has to say about more intelligent behavior.

Sources

Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, 2011
Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011
Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997

Mentioned or relevant

Passive Walking Robot Propelled By Its Own Weight (Youtube video)
Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 1984
Guy Steele, "How to Think About Parallel Programming – Not!", Strange Loop 2010. The first 26 minutes describe programs he wrote in the early 1970s.
Ed Nather, "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer", 1983. (I incorrectly called this "the story of Ed" in the episode.)
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, 2022
Andrew D. Wilson, "Prospective Control I: The Outfielder Problem" (blog post), 2011

Credits

The picture of a diving gannet is from the Busy Brains at Sea blog, and is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Deed.

EXCERPT: Concepts without categories

Brian Marick — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0500

This excerpt from episode 40 contains material independent of that episode's topic (collaborative circles) that might be of interest to people who don't care about collaborative circles. It mostly discusses a claim, due to Andy Clark, that words are not labels for concepts. Rather, words come first and concepts accrete around them. As a resolute, concepts are messy. Which is fine, because they don't need to be tidy.

Sources

Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, 2011
Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011

Mentioned

Emily Dickinson, "A narrow Fellow in the Grass", 1891 (I think version 2 is the original. Dickinson's punctuation was idiosyncratic, but early editions of her poetry conventionalized it.)
Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer", 1977
Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997. (This is the source for much of the argument, but I'm relaying it second hand, from Barrett.)

Credits

The image titled "Girl seated in middle of room with books; smaller child standing on stool and wearing dunce cap" is via the US Library of Congress and has no restrictions on publication. It is half of a stereograph card, dating to 1908.

EXCERPT: Christopher Alexander’s forces

Brian Marick — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 08:06:00 -0500

Software design patterns were derived from the work of architect Christopher Alexander, specifically his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. This excerpt (from episode 39) addresses a problem: most software people don't know one of Alexander's most important ideas, that of "forces".

Sources

Christopher Alexander et al, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, 1977.

Mentioned (or that I wish I'd found a way to mention)

Gamma et al, Design Patterns, 2004
Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design, 2003. I also like Joshua Kerievsky's pattern-language-like description of study groups, "Pools of Insight".
Brian Marick, "Patterns failed. Why? Should we care?", 2017 (video and transcript)
"Arches and Chains" (video) is a nice description of how arches work.
Ryan Singer, "Designing with forces: How to apply Christopher Alexander in everyday work", 2010 (video)

Credits

By Anneli Salo - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikipedia Commons

E40: Roles in collaborative circles, part 2: creative roles

Brian Marick — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0500

The last in the series on collaborative circles. The creative roles in a collaborative circle, discussed with reference to both Christopher Alexander's forces and ideas from ecological and embodied cognition. Special emphasis on collaborative pairs.

Sources

Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001
Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, 2011
Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011

Mentioned

Emily Dickinson, "A narrow Fellow in the Grass", 1891 (I think version 2 is the original. Dickinson's punctuation was idiosyncratic, but early editions of her poetry conventionalized it.)
Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer", 1977
Paul Karl Feyerabend, Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, 1995
Michael J. Reddy, "The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language", in A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 1979 (wikipedia article)
Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (Turing Award lecture), 1984

Credits

The picture of the umbrella or rotary clothesline is due to Pinterest user MJ Po. Don't tell Dawn it's the episode image.

E39: Roles in collaborative circles, part 1

Brian Marick — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0500

Farrell describes a number of distinct roles important to the development of a collaborative circle. This episode is devoted to the roles important in the early stages, when the circle is primarily about finding out what it is they actually dislike about the status quo. In order to make the episode more "actionable", I describe the roles using Christopher Alexander's style of concentrating on opposing "forces" that need to be balanced, resolved, or accommodated.

Sources

Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.
Christopher Alexander et al, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, 1977.

Mentioned (or that I wish I'd found a way to mention)

Gamma et al, Design Patterns, 2004
Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design, 2003. I also like Joshua Kerievsky's pattern-language-like description of study groups, "Pools of Insight".
Brian Marick, "Patterns failed. Why? Should we care?", 2017 (video and transcript)
"Arches and Chains" (video) is a nice description of how arches work.
Ryan Singer, "Designing with forces: How to apply Christopher Alexander in everyday work", 2010 (video)
"Rational Unified Process" (wikipedia)
James Bach, “Enough About Process, What We Need Are Heroes”, IEEE Software, March 1995.
Firesign Theatre, "I think we're all bozos on this bus", 1971. (wikipedia)
"Bloomers" (wikipedia article about a style of dress associated with first-wave feminists).

Credits

The picture is of Dawn and me sitting on our "Stair Seat", where we observe the activity on our lawn, sidewalk, and street. Which mainly consists of birds, squirrels, and people walking dogs. But it still fits Christopher Alexander's pattern of that name.

E38: The trajectory of a collaborative circle

Brian Marick — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 08:07:00 -0500

Collaborative circles don't have a smooth trajectory toward creative breakthrough. I describe the more common trajectory. I also do a little speculation on how a circle's "shared vision" consists of goals, habits, and "anti-trigger words." I also suggest that common notions of trust or psychological safety may not be fine-grained enough to understand circle-style creative breakthroughs.

I continue to work from Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.

Mentioned

"Bright and dull cows"
Sam Kaner, Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, 1996
Brian Marick, "Seven Years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out", 2008

Image credits

The image is of a route map for a particular cave complex in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, USA. There is not a nice linear path from the starting point to (any) destination. This is also true of creative work, like collaborative circles. The image is in the public domain.

E37: Resilience engineering with Lorin Hochstein

Brian Marick — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 09:22:41 -0500

An interview with Lorin Hochstein, resilience engineer and author. Our discussion was about how to handle a complex system that falls down hard and – especially – how to then prepare for the next incident. The discussion is anchored by David D. Woods' 2018 paper, “The Theory of Graceful Extensibility: Basic Rules that Govern Adaptive Systems”, which (in keeping with the theme of the podcast) focuses on a general topic, drawing more from emergency medicine than from software.

Lorin Hochstein

Mentioned

Brendan Green, "The Utilization, Saturation, and Errors (USE) method", 2012?
How Knight Capital lost $500 million very quickly. Link and link.
Lucy Tu for Scientific American, "Why Maternal Mortality Rates Are Getting Worse across the U.S.", 2023
David Turner, A Passion for Tango: A thoughtful, Provocative and Useful Guide to that Universal Body Language, Argentine Tango, 2004
Fixation over fomites as the transmission mechanism for COVID: Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?, Zeynep Tufekci (may be paywalled)
The safety podcast about a shipping company flying a spare empty airplane: PAPod 227 – What-A-Burger, Fedex, and Capacity, Todd Conklin, podcast

Correction

On pushing, pulling, and balance, A Passion for Tango says on pp. 34-5: "The leader begins the couple's movement by transmitting to his follower his intention to move with his upper body; he begins to shift his axis. The follower, sensing the intention, first moves her free leg and keeps the presence of her upper body still with the leader. [...] The good leader gives a clear, unambiguous and thoughtfully-timed indication of what he wants the follower to do. The good follower listens to the music and chooses the time to move. The leader, having given the suggestion, waits for the follower to initiate her movement and then follows her." He further says (p. 34), "As a leader acting as a follower, you really learn quickly how nasty it feels if your leader pulls you about, pushes you in the back or fails to indicate clearly enough what he wants."

Apologies. I was long ago entranced by the idea that walking is a sequence of "controlled falls". Which is true, but doesn't capture how walking is a sequence of artfully and smoothly controlled falls. Tango is that, raised to a higher power.

Credits

The episode image is from the cover of A Passion for Tango. The text describes the cover image as an example of a follower's "rapt concentration" that, in the episode, I called "the tango look".

E36: BONUS: One circle-style history of Context-Driven Testing

Brian Marick — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 10:15:11 -0500

I was a core member of what Farrell would call a collaborative circle: the four people who codified Context-Driven Testing. That makes me think I can supplement Farrell's account with what it feels like to be inside a circle. I try to be "actionable", not just some guy writing a memoir.

My topics are: what the context-driven circle was reacting against; the nature of the reaction and the resulting shared vision; how geographically-distributed circles work (including the first-wave feminist Ultras and the Freud/Fleiss collaboration); two meeting formats you may want to copy; why I value shared techniques over shared vision; how circles develop a shared tone and stereotyped reactions, not just a shared vision; and, the nature of “going public” with the vision.

Mentioned

Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.
Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, and Hung Quoc Nguyen, Testing Computer Software, 1993.
Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), 1863.
context-driven-testing.com (including the principles of context-driven testing), 2001?
Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach, 2002.
Association for Software Testing.
Elisabeth Hendrickson, Explore It! Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, 2012.
Jonathan Bach, "Session-Based Test Management", 2000.
Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain, 1972. (It's the second in a series that begins with Master and Commander.)

Four articles that demonstrate personal style:

James Bach, “Enough About Process, What We Need Are Heroes”, IEEE Software, March 1995.
Brian Marick, "New Models for Test Development", 1999.
Bret Pettichord, "Testers and Developers Think Differently", 2000.
James Bach, "Explaining Testing to THEM", 2001.

Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing and related:

Cem Kaner, "Improving the Maintainability of Automated Test Suites", 1997. (This contains the conclusions of LAWST 1 as an appendix.)
The LAWST Handbook (1999) and LAWST Format (1997?) describe the meeting format.
The "Pattern Writers' Workshop" style is most fully explained in Richard P. Gabriel, Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... (2002). James Coplien, "A Pattern Language for Writer's Workshops" (1997), describes writers' workshops in the "Alexandrian style" of pattern description (the one used in the seminal A Pattern Language). "Writers Workshop Guidelines" is a terse description.

Image credit

The image is the painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

BONUS: a circle-centric reading of software development through the 1990s, plus screech owls

Brian Marick — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 15:10:38 -0500

Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) describes how groups of people follow a trajectory from vague dislike of the status quo, to a sharpened criticism of it, to a shared vision (and supporting techniques) intended to displace it. The development of so-called "lightweight processes" in the 1990s can be viewed through that lens. I drag in a little discussion of binary oppositions as used in Lévi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology (1963) and later work.

Mentioned

The first NATO Software Engineering Conference, 1968
The SAGE air-defense network
David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, “A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It”, 1986
The Alphabet of Ben Sira. For the story of Lilith, see this episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast: "Lilith Unfair"
Etymology of "sinister"
Wulf Schiefenhövel, "Biased semantics for left and right in 50 Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages", 2013
Edsger Dijkstra, "On anthropomorphism in science", 1985
Edsger Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", 1975 (enthusiastically)
Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, 1980
Peter Adamson, "Plato's Phaedo" (podcast)
John W. Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis, 1977
Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 1999

Credit

The image of the screech owl is by permission of Erica Henderson. It was inspired by the "Doamurder, West Virginia (The Book of Genesis, Part 1)" episode of the Apocrypals podcast. I bought my Lilith T-shirt from their merch store, which also contains sticker versions, etc.

E34: /Collaborative Circles/, part 1: a teaser

Brian Marick — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 07:58:00 -0500

Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) is about how groups of people ("circles") begin with discomfort about the status quo and, after collaboration and discussion, make creative breakthroughs. It's based on six case studies. Four are circles of artists and painters, one looks at the early development of Freud's psychoanalysis, and one is devoted to a particular group of "first wave" feminist agitators.

This episode aims to tempt you to want to learn more: by summarizing two of Farrell's case studies. My original thinking was that Farrell's model of circle development would be generally applicable to software teams dissatisfied with the status quo of development and who didn't fit common models like forming-storming-norming-performing. As I dug into the details, I realized it's not as widely applicable as I'd hoped, at least without substantial customization. So the episode ends with some reasons you might not want to listen to the next one. But I hope you do!

Other sources and references

Cem Kaner and James Bach, Context-driven testing, 2012?
Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Bret Pettichord, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach, 2001
Donald Davidson, "Lee in the Mountains", 1938
The "Yes, and..." rule in improvisational comedy. See also Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). Looking for links, I also noticed Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration (2015), which seems to be a more standard business book. I haven't read it.

Credits

The episode image is "Ulysses and Nausicaa" by Charles Gleyre. In theme and style, it's the kind of art the Impressionists were rebelling against.

E33: Interview: Jessica Kerr on /Games: Agency as Art/

Brian Marick — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0500

Jessica Kerr (known to computers everywhere as @jessitron) is a software developer, speaker, and symmathecist. (A symmathesy is a learning system composed of learning parts. To her, each software team is a symmathesy composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all of their tools.) @jessitron is another of those people who apply ideas from outside software to software, including in her role as a developer advocate at Honeycomb, a company that aims to make the workings of software visible to its developers. Were she not engaging, personable, and enthusiastic, she'd be scarily like me. This conversation is about C. Thi Nguyen's book Games: Agency as Art, whose blurb starts, "Games are a unique art form. Game designers don’t just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, games work in the medium of agency."

Jessitron links

jessitron.com (symmathesy)
Mastodon
Twitter
Her calendar for observability office hours

References

C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 2020
Pandemic (cooperative board game), 2008
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, 2019
John Kay, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, 2010
The "Farm to Tabor" podcast episode: "Donut science, cars, & grassfed beef", 2018
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998

In the podcast, I mentioned classic English country gardens. I riffed a bit on Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia". It "explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from 'one of the most significant contemporary playwrights' in the English language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written." I cut the riff out because – embarrassingly – I couldn't remember the names of either the play or its author. From personal experience, I can recommend this full cast performance for a road trip. On that trip, we also listened to the Alzabo Soup podcast's multi-episode commentary.

Photo credit: me

E32: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 3: expertise, panopticism, and the Big Visible Chart

Brian Marick — Mon, 08 May 2023 08:00:00 -0500

The final episode of "the Foucault trilogy". Ways of evaluating humans that became common during the ~1750-1850 period. Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor. Self-improvement via exhibitionism. Final reflections on Foucault.

Sources

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975.
C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000.
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 1999.

Other sources

Mississippi State University Extension, "Dairy Cattle Judging".
Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon Writings (PDF), Miran Božović (ed.), 1995.
The Koepelgevangenis panopticon is described in "The Panopticon Effect" podcast episode. (There is no transcript, but there is a longish narrative.)
Ron Jeffries, "Big Visible Charts", 2004.
"Brainless slime mold grows in pattern like Tokyo’s subway system", 2022 (video).

Contact links (if you want the bonus episode on "Edgelord Foucault")

Email: marick@exampler.com
Mastodon: @marick@social.oddly-influenced.dev

Picture credit
BigVisibleCharts.com (archived), Marty Andrews.

E31: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 2: the factory

Brian Marick — Mon, 01 May 2023 08:12:00 -0500

An intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do* with that theory in the sense of "applying it to software". So it doesn't really fit with the podcast theme. But his is a disturbing theory for the problem-solvers among us, so I make it more palatable by comparing it to a cult horror movie from 1997.

Sources

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975
C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000
Vincenzo Natali, script for the movie "Cube", 6th draft
Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. The chapter I cite is “Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage”

Other mentions

On large language models and "a judicious amount of randomness", Stephen Wolfram's "What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?" is good.
Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, 1987
Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, 2002
The Eastern State Penitentiary was a model prison that featured solitary confinement, a Bible as the only possession, and piecework in the cell. It was the founding institution of what came to be called "The Pennsylvania System." See also "Eastern State Penitentiary: A Prison With a Past".
I mention an idea I got from Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. I don't exactly remember the sources. For Rorty, it was probably Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. For Fish, it might have been Is There a Text in This Class?
Image credit
The image is the Albion flour mill, completed in 1786, which was possibly the referent of Blake's "dark satanic mills" in his poem Jerusalem:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

E30: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, and voluntary panopticism, part 1

Brian Marick — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 08:09:00 -0500

Part 1 is a synopsis of Foucault's claim that the societal attitude toward punishment of criminals changed radically over a period of about 80 years, starting in the mid-1700s: from punishment as vengeance, to punishment as persuading the minds of many, to punishment as correcting the personality of one.

Books

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975
C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000

Random other stuff

Brian Marick, "Artisanal Retro-Futurism Crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism" (text and video), 2009
The environment of evolutionary adaptedness
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962
N.W. Mogensen, "Crimes and Punishments in Eighteenth-Century France", 1977
Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Kieran Healy, "Escaping the Malthusian Trap", an animated graph showing the relationship between the population of Britain and its GDP over time, illustrating the discontinuity caused by the industrial revolution.
Wikipedia article about the cult horror movie "Cube"

Credits

The image is of Adam Smith's pin factory, possibly from Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1780). D. Diderot & J. d’Alembert.

E29: Interview: Trond Hjorteland on a radical approach to organizational transformation

Brian Marick — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0500

Open Systems Theory (OST) is an approach to organizational transformation that dates back to the late 1940s. It's been applied a fair amount, but hasn't gotten much mindshare in the software world. It has similarities to Agile, but leans into self-organization in a much more thoroughgoing way.

For example, in an OST organization,

teams aren't given a product backlog, they create it themselves.
if a team decides they need to slow the pace of delivery to learn new things or to spend more time refactoring, their decision is final.
pay is based on skills, not productivity, so as to encourage multi-skilled people.
team work is organized so that there are career paths within the team, rather than advancement depending on leaving a team and rising up in a hierarchy.

OST is even more radical at the levels above the team. Unlike scaled-agile approaches like SAFe or LeSS, OST changes the jobs of the people higher in the org chart just as much – or more? – than people at the leaves of the tree. Specifically, the shift is from order-giving to coordination at different timescales. Individual "leaf" teams are responsible for the short term, the next level up is responsible for the medium term and external partners, and the CxO levels focus on the long term.

This episode is an interview with Trond Hjorteland, who – after experience with Agile – did an impressively deep dive into OST.

Sources
As noted in the podcast, there's not much accessible documentation about OST. However, Trond and his merry band of (mostly) Agilists have begun work on a new site. Trond has also written "Thriving with complexity using open sociotechnical systems design", originally published in InfoQ.

Trond's blog.
Trond is on Mastodon at @trondhjort.

Image credit
The image is from the cover of the Marvel Comics graphic novel Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: Higher, Further, Faster, More.

E28: /Governing the Commons/, part 4: creating a successful commons

Brian Marick — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:03:00 -0500

I describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a similar improvement.

As with earlier episodes, I'm leaning on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik Nordman’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action.

I also mention James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, which I discuss starting with episode 17.

More about Gal Oya and similar projects

Uphoff, N.T. "People's Participation in Water Management: Gal Oya, Sri Lanka". In Public Participation in Development Planning and Management: Cases from Africa and Asia, ed. J.C. Garcia-Samor, 1985
Perera, J. "The Gal Oya Farmer Organization Programme: A Learning Process?" In Participatory Management in Sri Lanka's Irrigation Schemes, 1986.
Korten, D. "Community Organization and Rural Development: a Learning Process Approach", Public Administration on Review 40, 1980 (Philippines, Bangladesh)
Korten, F. "Building National Capacity to Develop Water Users' Associations: Experience from the Philippines, World Bank working paper 528, 1982
Rahman, A. "Some Dimensions of People's Participation in the Bloomni Sena Movement", United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1981 (Nepal)
Rabibhadena, A. The Transformation of Tambon Yokkrabat, Changwat Samut Sakorn, Thammasat University, 1980 (Thailand).

Refactoring books I have liked

Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999
William C. Wake, Refactoring Workbook, 2003
Joshua Kerievsky, Refactoring to Patterns, 2004
Scott W. Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage, Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, 2006

The Strangler Fig pattern

Fowler's original blog post
A case study I commissioned, way back when.

Credits

"Agriculture in Extreme Environments - Irrigation channel for wheat fields and date palms" by Richard Allaway is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

E27: /Governing the Commons/, part 3: Man, 63, seeks software teams, any age. Object: matchmaking

Brian Marick — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 08:03:00 -0600

A short episode that encourages members of software teams to give Elinor Ostrom's ideas a try, in two ways:

1. I'm arranging for Elinor Ostrom's intellectual heirs to provide support.
2. Your situation is not worse than those of Sri Lankan farmers in the Gal Oya irrigation system. A commons-style approach helped them, so why couldn't it help you?

I'm looking for teams who want to collaborate with Indiana University's Ostrom Workshop, and I intend to provide financing.

E26: /Governing the Commons/, part 2: the key mechanisms

Brian Marick — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 08:21:00 -0600

Ostrom's core principles for the design of successful commons: how to monitor compliance with rules, how to punish non-compliance, how to resolve disputes, and how to participate in making rules.

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, 1990
Erik Nordman, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action, 2021
"The dirty little secret of contract law"

Image of lobster buoys from Flickr user Raging Wire, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

/Governing the Commons/, part 1: setting the scene

Brian Marick — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 08:03:00 -0600

This is the first of two or three episodes that draw on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik Nordman’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action.

What I hope is that those lessons apply to the problem of keeping codebases from devolving into unworkable piles of crap.

Ostrom has nine design principles for designing successful commons governance. I mention them all in this episode, and provide Ostrom's summary below. In the descriptions, "CPR" stands for "Common Pool Resource" (that is, a commons). "Appropriation rules" govern extracting "resource units" from the commons. "Provision rules" govern improvement and maintenance of the commons.

I've replaced some of the bolded summaries with my own when Ostrom's had too much jargon.

Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.

The rules governing a CPR are strongly influenced by local context: Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and money.

Those affected by rules make them: Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.

Monitoring: Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.

Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.

Conflict-resolution mechanisms: Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.

Minimal recognition of the right to organize: The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.

For CPRs that are parts of larger systems:

Nested enterprises: Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

--------

In the podcast, I said "There will always be pressure to deliver faster. There’s been a lot written on reducing that pressure, or resisting it. That’s off topic for these episodes, so I’ll put links in the show notes." Well, I thought there were, but I don't have anything to offer you yet.

Here's a comment from Sasha Cuerda:

"a tactic I have used in the past is ADRs. Basically keep receipts documenting the trade off being made. When my team had a track record of correctly and proactively assessing and documenting risk and those documents kept surfacing in retros tied to those risks materializing, we gained credibility with the non-manager stakeholders impacted by incidents and were able to push back. But def a long game.

"it helped that we had an already established and blessed practice of using ADRs in other contexts. They weren’t initially seen as “resistance” but as part of established good practice."

I did remember a blog post I wrote long ago, warning new agile teams not to deliver too much value too soon before they know how to do it sustainably.

"I find myself advising new Agile teams to go slower than they could. Here’s the thing: at the beginning, they’re probably working on a bad code base, and they have yet to learn important rules and habits. They will find it easy to go faster than is compatible with making the code more malleable. [...]"

But that's not really the same problem.

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Image of grazing cattle due to Emilian Robert Vicol is licensed under CC BY 2.0 and was obtained from OpenUniverse.org.

BONUS: Seeing like a personality survey

Brian Marick — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 07:40:00 -0600

My goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than people on the left.”

TL;DR: For practical purposes, it doesn't mean anything.

You might guess, from the previous episode, that it's just that personality traits don't predict behavior. That's true, but more interesting things are going on: What does "open to experience" mean, actually? How much less open are conservatives?

Key sources:

John M. Digman, "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model", 1999
Literal Banana (a pseudonym!), "The Ongoing Accomplishment of the Big Five", 2020
Literal Banana, "Survey Chicken", 2020
Konstantin Löwe, "Is Politics Downstream from Personality? The Five Factor Model’s Effect on Political Orientation in Sweden", 2019

Image credit:

The scatter plot showing a low-but-significant correlation was generated by Brian Marick in 2011. I don't remember the program I used.

Personality and destiny

Brian Marick — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 07:41:00 -0600

It’s hard to predict how personality traits will affect behavior in new situations.
We don’t have a good grasp of the difference between a “new situation” and “a variant of an old situation.”
Small differences in the situation (like recent good luck) can make a big difference in how traits like “helpfulness” are expressed.
So you'll probably need to try it and see ("probe-sense-response"), rather than assume you can find out enough to predict ("sense-analyze-respond").

Summary sources:

John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, 2005. (This is focused on questions in the philosophical idea of "virtue ethics". Unless you care about that, this is mostly a place to find primary sources.)
Walter Mischel, "Toward an Integrative Science of the Person", 2004

Also cited or used:

Theodore Newcomb, The consistency of certain extrovert-introvert behavior patterns in 51 problem boys, 1929. (Not available online. Link is to the University of Illinois Library copy. All hail interlibrary loan!)
Alice M. Isen and Paula F. Levin, "Effect of feeling good on helping: cookies and kindness", 1972. (The pay phone experiment)
John M. Darley and Daniel Batson, "'From Jerusalem to Jericho': A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior", 1973 (the seminarian experiment).
John M. Digman, "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model", 1999
Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment, 1968
David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone, "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making", Harvard Business Review, 2007. (I used this for quotes and claims about the Cynefin framework, which is pronounced "kuh-NEV-in", as it's a Welsh word.)
Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 1998

Miscellaneous:

Credits

Two-slot postage stamp vending machine image courtesy the Smithsonian Museum. Public domain.

This is not an episode (a diversion into what makes explanations good)

Brian Marick — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 08:06:00 -0600

The key message begins with the observation that categories and concepts have central examples and fuzzy boundaries. The idea that categories are usefully defined by boolean-valued necessary and sufficient conditions is outdated. The stock example is the question: "Is the pope a bachelor?" The answer is, "Well, technically", but there are clearly more central examples that capture more of the concept's connotations. (See Lakoff's 1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Gregory L. Murphy's 2004 The Big Book of Concepts is more exhaustive and covers different theories.)

Examples teach you what lays within the (fuzzy) boundary. Counterexamples teach you what lays outside. You need both.

Stories stimulate the kind of learning that happens from lived experience and social interaction.

These claims are illustrated by the kind of examples, counterexamples, and stories that I think Etienne Wenger should have (but mostly did not) use in his 1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. The episode isn't a comprehensive – or perhaps even accurate – explanation of his theory. Because (I believe) of how the book was written, my understanding of the theory is shaky.

I also drew on these writings:

Wenger, Snyder, and McDermott, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, 2002

Cox, Andrew M., "What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal works", 2005
Etienne Wenger, "Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems: the Career of a Concept", 2010

I mentioned Tinderbox, a note-taking app, and Bike, an outliner.

I mentioned my habit of writing books that include mistakes that are later corrected. As advertised, the first book I wrote this way is RubyCocoa: Bringing Some Ruby Love to OS X Programming. That's a book about dead technology, and is out of print. Perhaps the best example of this style was the unfinished An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming, which is free. (The finished part is about Elm, which alas also seems dead.) Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer is an introduction to Clojure, uses something of the include-mistakes style, was pretty successful, but is old enough I've also made it free.

The description of the apocryphal story of Saint Thecla is from the Apocrypals podcast. There's more than just man-eating seals.

The science fiction story Año Nuevo is by Ray Naylor.

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Picture of Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" via Flickr user darryl_mitchel, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Legitimate peripheral participation: the book and the idea

Brian Marick — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 07:10:00 -0600

Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 1991. Note: I'd say this is the least readable of the books I've covered so far, especially if you're allergic to jargon-heavy academic social science. On the plus side, it's only 123 pages (excluding bibliography and index).

Étienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, 1998
"I sure as hell am not going to share my knowledge here for free!"
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 1996

Credits

The episode image is "Apprentice" by Louis Emile Adan (1839-1937), circa 1914, original copyrighted by Braun&Co., N.Y., but copyright not renewed. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.

/Talking About Machines/: copier repair technicians and story-telling

Brian Marick — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 06:21:00 -0600

Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, 1996

Credits

Image of a person using a copier via Mr. Domingo.

/Seeing Like a State/, part 3: the users, the clients

Brian Marick — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 08:19:00 -0600

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.

XKCD, Always try to get data good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961.

Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, The Russian Revolution

Credits

Image of a cow being given a physical exam ("bright or dull") courtesy Dawn Marick.

/Seeing Like a State/, part two: recognizing your High Modernist eidolon

Brian Marick — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 10:09:33 -0600

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.

Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of the novels is Something Coming Through. Here's a review. "Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was" is a short story that I think stands alone. I quote from the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, but I wouldn't read it first unless you're a fan of Gene Wolfe and like figuring out the backstory yourself.

E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1995
Paul Feyerabend, Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, 1972.

Credits

Worker and Kolkhoz (collective farm) Woman Monument from C.K. Leung, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Although I don't dwell on it in this episode, Scott uses the Soviet collective farm as a big example of a failure of Seeing Like a State.

E17: James C. Scott’s /Seeing Like a State/, part one

Brian Marick — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 08:11:00 -0600

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.

The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.dev

Credits

Satellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Interview: Glenn Vanderburg on engineering

Brian Marick — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 08:09:00 -0600

Mentioned

One of Glenn's talks on engineering.
The first part of Hillel Wayne's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good.
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969
Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, 2010
David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It", 1986.
The Neal Ford talk about constraints was taken down from YouTube because Protecting Intellectual Property by removing a whole talk that uses a short clip is far more important than Mr. Ford's ideas.

Glenn's other recommendations:

What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, by Walter Vincenti
Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, by Eugene S. Ferguson
Definition of the Engineering Method, by Billy Vaughn Koen
A number of Henry Petroski’s books shed valuable light on the actual practice of engineering:
- To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
- Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing
- Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering
- Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design
- To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure
- Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (this is quite different from the others, but by telling the real, non-idealized tale of how so many great bridges were built — including several disastrous failures and many other near failures — this book was instrumental in helping me understand how inaccurate the common stereotype of engineering really is)

Credits

Image of double effect distillation chemical plant via Wikimedia Commons. User:Luigi Chiesa, CC BY 3.0. Cropped by Brian Marick.

Interview: Mark Seemann on /Blindsight/ and /Thinking, Fast and Slow/

Brian Marick — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0600

Mark Seemann

The books

Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006. Goodreads description. Or: free at the author's site.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011

Also mentioned

Read Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, 2006
Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain, 2021
George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", 1956
Rich Hickey, "Hammock-Driven Development" (video), 2010
Peter Watts, Echopraxia, 2014
Poincaré's 1904 essay on creativity is described (with extensive quotes) in this article. The original source for the essay is his book The Foundations of Science, starting on page 179, a chapter titled "Mathematical Creation". The book is freely available for Kindle and in other formats via the Wayback Machine.
Jamis Buck, Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages, 2015
Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software, 1996. Free at the author's site.

Credits

The image of Theseus, the spaceship in Blindsight, is from a page from Peter Watts' website. The image is not marked Creative Commons, though the whole novel is, so I'm hoping Mr. Watts won't mind.

BONUS: Lord, preserve us from totalizing systems

Brian Marick — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 06:39:00 -0500

DDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, 2021
Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows'
Aimi Hussein and Racheal Bryant, "The secret life of cows: Social behavior in dairy herds" (PDF)
Ian Welsh, "The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred"
Paul Feyerabend and Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001
John T. Jost, A Theory of System Justification, 2004. Which I have not read, but I have listened to a podcast conversation with him.
James Suzman, "Why 'Bushman banter was crucial to hunter-gatherer's evolutionary success", derived from his book Affluence Without Abundance, 2017
Peter Freuchen, Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimos, 1961
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975

Credits

Image of a veterinarian succussing a Holstein cow courtesy Dawn Marick, DVM, MS, DACVIM(LA).

David Graeber’s three kinds of economies

Brian Marick — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 08:12:00 -0500

David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011

People mentioned

Einar W. Høst

David Graeber, gift economies, and open source projects

Brian Marick — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 08:09:00 -0500

David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011
Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000

Credits

Picture of a Kula ring gift item, Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Analogies in and around /Image and Logic/

Brian Marick — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:12:00 -0500

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
The 1968 Software Engineering Conference
An objection to the trading zone
Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, 2002.
Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000

Credits

Roulette wheel image from Flickr user k-bot, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Mini-episode: What does Galison mean by “tradition”?

Brian Marick — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:24:00 -0500

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
Wikipedia on academic genealogy
@made_in_cosmos had a tweet about tradition that I mentioned
Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth, 1998
Context-driven testing website and book
The Agile Fusion workshop description
People mentioned: Lisa Crispin, Ward Cunningham, Janet Gregory, GeePaw Hill, Simon Peyton-Jones

Credits

An image from an undated review of a staging of "Fiddler on the Roof". DuckDuckGo claims it's CC-licensed, but I can't tell. I'm gonna risk it.

Mini-episode: Galison doubts Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolutions

Brian Marick — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 09:47:00 -0500

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962
Steven Law, "Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception?", 2018. (Also has a picture of the Necker cube, which Kuhn also uses. Come to think of it, it might be he only uses the Necker cube, not the rabbit/duck.)
Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970. (The proceedings of a 1965 conference on Kuhn's ideas. It cannot have been fun for Kuhn.)

Credits

Flask from DataBase Center for Life Science (DBCLS), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Galison’s /Image and Logic/, Part 2: The Trading Zone

Brian Marick — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 08:16:00 -0500

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997

Credits

Roman coin depicting the harbor at Ostia, from the title page of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, translated by Wilfred H. Schoff, 1912. Source unknown, but the entire book is public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Galison’s /Image and Logic/, Part 1: The stickiness of experimental tradition

Brian Marick — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 08:16:00 -0500

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997

Brian Marick, An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming, unfinished
Brian Marick, Lenses for the Mere Mortal: Purescript Edition, unfinished

Programming languages: Clojure, ClojureScript, Elixir, Elm, Purescript

Credits

Photo of proton-antiproton collision from UA5 collaboration, CERN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

E7: Imre Lakatos on what persuades scientists to risk their careers

Brian Marick — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 08:15:00 -0500

Lakatos in a nutshell

Scientists join research programmes. Research programmes are characterized by a small hard core of 2-5 postulates that guide development of theories and experiments. The hard core is not questioned from within the research programme.

To be progressive, a research program must produce a series of dramatic ("novel") predictions that are confirmed by experiment. This is in contrast to the mainstream account of science, which emphasizes that it's rational to believe in a theory only if its predictions are not (yet) refuted. Lakatos's argument is that real scientists don't abandon beliefs because they're refuted. Indeed, "theories grow in a sea of anomalies, and counterexamples are merrily ignored."

While anomalies or counterexamples are generally shelved to deal with later, some are too telling to ignore. Scientists react by producing an protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses. Those are of two sorts:

The good kind are theories in their own right that also lead to novel predictions and confirmations.
"ad hoc" hypotheses are those purely created to defend the research programme, to explain away counterexamples. They don't lead to useful predictions.

Note that you can't tell from the outside which category a protective theory falls into. That's discovered over time.

Unlike the hard core, parts of the protective belt can be dropped or replaced.

A research programme is degenerating if:

it does not lead to stunning new predictions (at least occasionally...);
all its bold predictions are falsified; and
it does not grow in steps which "follow the spirit of the programme". That most likely means that it's no longer building by finding implications of its hard core. Instead, the researchers spend their time constructing ad hoc protective theories.

A research programme can recover from degenerating and become progressive again.

The wikipedia article has more detail. It's pretty good as of this episode's publication date.

References

The standard reference is Lakatos's Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 1978, Currie & Worrell (editors). I personally found a series of Lakatos's transcribed lectures more useful for this episode. They're in For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, 1995, Motterlini (editor). Lakatos and Feyerabend were both friends and sparring partners with very different views about science. Unfortunately, Feyerabend didn't save most of Lakatos's letters, and Feyerabend's letters tend more toward gossip than debate about issues. It's quite a loss, given that Lakatos died young (age 51).

I don't mention it in the podcast, but Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, 1976, Worrall and Zaher (editors) is a wonderful book. It's a series of fictional conversations between a teacher and his students that recapitulates the history of Euler's polyhedron formula, V-E+F=2. As with his later Methodology did for science, Lakatos demonstrates that mathematics isn't just a steady accumulation of knowledge. Mathematicians don't just play the definition-theorem-proof game; they also use techniques like "monster barring". You'll be surprised by how entertaining it is.

Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, (first edition, 1950). Wikipedia article.
The Millikin oil drop experiment.
The manifesto for Agile software development.
Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (second edition, 2004).
Edward Yourdon, Death March (first edition 1997).
My Bothered Bolsheviks are described in Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power (1878-1928), 2014.

Credits

Imre Lakatos courtesy Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Interview: James Shore and Boundary Objects

Brian Marick — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 08:15:00 -0500

James Shore: website, The Art of Agile Development, AOAD book club, twitter

Mentioned

Susan Leigh Star, This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept, 2010
Jeff Patton: website, story mapping articles, story mapping book, twitter
Gojko Adzic: website, book on impact mapping, impact mapping website, twitter
Diana Larson: website, twitter
Alistair Cockburn: website, twitter
Jessica Kerr: website, twitter, symmathesy
Michael Feathers: website, twitter

Miro collaboration app
Gather.town a collaboration app mimics more properties of physical space

Pictures

A Patton-style story map
An Adzic-style impact mapping
A Shore-style cluster map
A sequence diagram

Credits

Shoreline image by Flickr user dronepicr, CC BY 2.0

Interview: Downsides of packages, upsides of jUnit (with Elisabeth Hendrickson and Chris McMahon) ("Packages", Part 4)

Brian Marick — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:15:00 -0500

Guests
Elisabeth Hendrickson, @testobsessed, Curious Duck Digital Laboratory
Chris McMahon, @chris_mcmahon, blog

Citations
Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997.
Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, Elisabeth Hendrickson, 2012.

Theories of What? or: Richard Rorty Weighs in on TDD ("Packages", Part 3)

Brian Marick — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 08:15:00 -0500

Citations
Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty, 1989.
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Kent Beck, 1996.
Ward Cunningham on "working the program", 2004.
The Mathematical Experience, Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, 1980.
"Elephant Talk", King Crimson, 1981 (audio).
"Hammock-Driven Development", Rich Hickey, 2010 (video).
"What is Hammock-Driven Development?", Keagan Stokoe, 2021

Credits
Image of contrasting words from Flickr user andeecollard, Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0

jUnit and What Makes a Successful Tool ("Packages", Part 2)

Brian Marick — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 08:15:00 -0500

Recombinant DNA ("gene splicing") was a wildly successful technology in the world of cell biology. Its success gave credibility to the associated "proto-oncogene theory of cancer." The theory piggy-backed on the tool.

jUnit was a fairly successful tool in the world of Java programmers. But it was not as successful as recombinant DNA, and it was fairly unsuccessful at promoting its associated theory of test-driven design.

This episode looks at what (according to Joan Fujimura's ideas about the history of molecular biology) is required for a tool to be successful, and why jUnit's theory didn't successfully piggyback on the tool.

Sources mentioned

Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997.
Molecular Cloning, a Laboratory Manual (Fourth Edition), Michael R. Green and Joseph Sambrook, 2012.
“Test Infected: Programmers Love Writing Tests”, Kent Beck and Eric Gamma.
"JUnit: A Cook's Tour", Kent Beck and Eric Gamma.
Junit Recipes: Practical Methods for Programmer Testing, J. B. Rainsberger, 2003.
XUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code, Gerard Meszaros, 2007.

My question about the adoption of TDD

E2: Viruses, Cancer, TDD, and "Packages": Part 1

Brian Marick — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 08:15:00 -0500

When TDD arrived on the software scene around 1980, it became popular very fast. Why did it succeed so well?

I think it's because it was a combined theory and technology that hit the same "sweet spot" of intellectual infectiousness that the "proto-oncogene theory of cancer" did in the 1980's. Most of this episode is a history of the proto-oncogene theory. The next episode will look at case studies in software.

Sources:

Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997.
"Crafting science: Standardized packages, boundary objects, and 'Translation.'", Joan Fujimura, in Science as Practice and Culture, Andrew Pickering (ed.), 1992.
The Craft of Software Testing, Brian Marick, 1994. (Don't buy this book unless you need it for the unauthorized biography of me that you're writing. It's terribly out of date.)

Credits

I mention a comment from Twitter user James Thomas (@qahiccupps)
The DNA artwork is by Zephyris - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Thanks to Dawn Marick for checking the draft script.

E1: Boundary Objects

Brian Marick — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 11:21:14 -0500

The episode builds from the paper “Institutional Ecology, 'Translations', and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939”. It contains a brief history of how biology was changing around 1907, how scientists and collectors collaborated using "boundary objects", and how acceptance tests can be seen as boundary objects. It ends with some heretical thoughts about business alignment.

Later: preparing for episode 21, I found that Étienne Wenger has some useful things to say about boundary objects in his Communities of Practice. I wrote a short summary on my blog.

Credits

Thanks to Randy Clayton and Dawn Marick for advice about the script.
Elephant image by Nikhil Bombatkar, licensed CC0 - Free to Use, Attribution Optional