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In the story Alice in Wonderland, Alice encounters a cat that disappears. The cat has a long conversation with Alice and grins; slowly it starts to disappear leaving only its grin. Alice remarks

Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; `but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever say in my life!

To Alice it is so easy to associate the grin with the cheshire cat, but someone else who looks only at the grin will not be able to understand where did this grin come from.

During school days,  my programming started with BASIC, it was introduced to me as high level languages. Curiosity and college curriculum made me go little low level and understand assembly & machine level to do some simple addition subtraction programs on it. The pain of using that made me understand the need for using a high level language. I would often write simple C programs and check the assembly generated by it to compare it with hand written assembly code and used to think that I could optimise the assembly code if I hand write and preferred low level for size & performance.

The idea of writing programs in assembly quickly died down after I learnt to write complex programs in C and Java but not able to get the same from assembly in the same amount of time, it plants a grin when we see what we wanted on the screen. I was just curious and sometimes try to see what happens behind the scenes for my C programs. Fast forward into current workplace, there was a rapid change in the way I could create a webapp; all I needed was to run a command and I get a skeleton webapp. It is like the cheshire cat grinning at me but there was no cat only the grin. I understand the grin because I have seen the cat, does it make a difference for people who have not spent time understanding at lower levels? Do people see the modern programming tools as magic or will curiosity drive us to understand what is happening behind the scenes?

 You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. – Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio

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My idea of spending free time more productively were to read books, assimilate knowledge from any source. With less access to internet and gadgets while in school & college, there was a lot of time available to churn what I have read and heard about; and try to do something with that knowledge gained. As the devices and internet became cheaper, my consumption increased a great deal that I ended being a obsessive consumer of information but I do very little with what I have gained.

The tasks which we have cut out ourselves in the name of productivity are called Masked Productivity. I read a blog in which the author describes about a casual encounter with an inventor Russel Kirsch. Reading, listening and watching has been done again and again for generations. The new age gadgets like smart phones, e-readers and tablets makes it more and more easy and compulsive to read, listen and watch. In the rush of overfeeding the senses we forget that all these devices were invented only because few people did something which was never done before. We end up being chronic consumers and leave the awesome creation part to a select few.

From the time that I read that blog I have begun to be conscious of what I do, if not I would have missed some wonderful opportunities of meeting new people, churning up ideas at work and also some good relaxing sleep. Be aware of those masked productivity tasks; they make you tired, miss out good opportunities, deprive you of me time and may be prevent you from creating something.

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Every one of us have our share of bad judgement and we either get away with it or we pay a heavy price for that. An idea that friendly strangers are bad would have prevented me from getting some great friends, yet we carry around stereotypes and preconceived ideas every day and put to use those ones. Some of the things which affect our judgement are

Ladder of inference/ Mental models

I came across these terms in Peter Senge’s The fifth discipline. It is about how we form opinions based on our narrow scope of observation and later on due to the influence of those opinions we form, we select the data from the event which validates our opinions. This was very well explained by one of my peers through an activity.

The facilitator randomly threw few pens on the floor and asked the audience for a number, the audience counted the no. of pens and gave an answer which he rejected by giving some random number. He continued to do the same thing many times and the audience started giving random numbers for ten consecutive times. After that he revealed that he was showing the number in his hands and the pens on the floor was just a decoy, post that when he threw the pens down people started noticing the number in his hand. In this experiment people just formed an opinion by relating to the pens down on the floor and the number.

It is no wonder why people form opinions based on their first impression/interaction, the world we perceive is just a model we have created based on the data we selected which are hardly verifiable or incomplete facts.

Recency effect/ Primacy effect

It is very easy to remember things which happened recently than a while ago. It is also very very easy to remember the first encounter but lots of things which happen in the middle tends to get lost. This effect in the hands of business people has become an effective tool but in the layman’s world if only the first and last things matter; then people who put a consistent effort to maintain something are not rewarded much compared to people who just create a great first impression and leave on a positive note but have completely messy approach.

We are always on the run and may not be able to review things as a whole but it is better to not concentrate on first and last things but look at things as a whole, it is very easy for us to form opinions based on just the first and recent impressions.

Availability heuristics

This is tricky, we like to consider ourselves intelligent and knowledgable; so we think that we have carefully selected the data and formed our opinions. Things which happen as expected is never a news, the one which comes up in the news is always something odd. News is often sensationalized, a good example is about the safety of the airplane travel. If we are able to imagine something vividly, then it is easy for us to picture the good things or pitfalls in it. We always look for shortcuts to confirm our opinions are right and that affects our judgement a lot, this often combines with the recency effect.

Good judgement comes with experience, experience comes with bad judgement

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