Follow-up: Musical Redemption

Re. the phenomenon described in the 'Musical redemption' post below, I thought of another, interesting manifestation of the same thing. It happens when I write notes to myself.

I normally walk around with a couple of blank record cards in my pocket. Whenever some stray thought hits me, I write it down. Sometimes, if I'm really enthusiastic about an idea, I put lots of exclamation marks on it, double underscore, that kind of thing.

Two weeks later, when I pull out the record card again and look it over, I am completely clueless as to what some of my own notes mean. I look at a note and think "Now what the hell was I thinking when I wrote that?" I literally cannot guess or remember what the idea was, based on my disjointed scribblings.

What I think happens here is the exact same thing as with the musical experiment, where the sender 'fills out' the communication with details in his own head. Me-in-the-past writes something down that makes perfect sense to myself, based on the tapestry of thoughts that I have in my head when I write it. Two weeks later, when me-in-the-future reads the note, the background thoughts are not there to inform the reading, making it a lot harder to remember what the note was supposed to mean. Me-in-the-past simply fails to see that the sentence "frame publish - slush!" will not necessarily be clear to me-in-the-future. For this reason, I have now started to write (what seems like) overly extensive notes to myself, with some success.

This, by the way, is an instance of something I find fascinating, namely intrapersonal communication - inTRApersonal, as in communicating with yourself. It is an entirely underestimated and underresearched area within the field of communication studies (where I originally come from). I actually wrote a brief 20-page university paper on intrapersonal communication back in 2003, but be warned, it's in Danish. I might go more into this subject in a later post.

The Problem With Procrastination

We all know that procrastination is a bad thing.

We really shouldn’t be doing it; putting problems off till tomorrow that we could be dealing with today. Action is good. Being proactive about things is even better. An immense amount of praise will flow towards the employees that are being proactive, dealing with issues before they become problems.

Now, there’s something slightly disconcerting about all this proactivity. Dealing with problems before they become problems? You have to wonder how many man-hours are being wasted on issues that were never actually going to become a problem in the first place. “Good news: I’ve been proactive about our polar bear problem” - “Err... are we going to have problems with polar bears?” - “Well, not now that I’ve been proactive about it, obviously.”

The fact is, when human beings are prone to procrastinate, it is because it surprisingly often works. I literally cannot count the number of problems I have solved by the simple action of ignoring them completely. Some problems solve themselves, given time. Other problems turn out not to be problems after all. And even real and persistent problems will sometimes get fixed by a person with a lower tolerance for impending doom.

Also, procrastination has a wonderful ability to make all of your other, slightly less unpleasant tasks seem positively rewarding in comparison. Would the desks of your employees ever get cleaned if it wasn’t for that nasty report they are trying to avoid getting started on? Mine wouldn’t. In fact, I’m normally quite productive when I am procrastinating, this post being a good example.

So, when to procrastinate, and when to be proactive? A general rule is that you should be proactive about an issue only when the cost of the proactive measures is lower than the cost of dealing with the problem later, timed by the probability that the problem will actually occur. Say, if you have a 50 percent chance of having to do a 10,000 dollar repair operation, you should be proactive about it only if the cost of being proactive is lower than 5,000 dollars. That way, you will tend to win out in the long run.

Of course, this rule works only when you can reliably estimate both the costs and the probabilities involved – and when there is a long run, i.e. when the issues that are on the line are not life-threateningly big for your company. If it is a one-off situation where a bad outcome will destroy your company, it may make sense to err on the side of caution, if nothing else than to atttain peace of mind.

Musical Redemption + Angry Email Syndrome

I can practically never make my friends recognise the tunes I sing to them.

If I try humming the latest radio hit, I will receive perplexed looks from them, followed by general sniggering and good-natured ridicule. The explanation seems simple: my musical talents are not quite up to scratch. Well, that, or maybe, just maybe, my friends have been ganging up on me for years, conspiring to pull a massive practical joke (“Oh – it was Happy Birthday you tried to hum! Sounded like something from Wagner to me.”). The bastards.

Anyway, all became clear as I received this illuminating article from my good friend and academic brother-in-arms, Jonas Heide Smith, who has a blog of his own detailing the progress of his PhD thesis on cooperation and conflict in computer games (not related to the following).

"the music tapping study conducted by Elizabeth Newton (1990). Participants in her study were asked to tap the rhythm of a well-known song to a listener and then assess the likelihood that the listener would correctly identify the song. The results were striking: Tappers estimated that approximately 50% of listeners would correctly identify the song, compared with an actual accuracy rate of 3%. What accounts for this dramatic overestimation?

The answer becomes immediately apparent when one contrasts the perspectives of tappers and listeners, as Ross and Ward (1996) invited their readers to do when describing Newton’s results. Whereas tappers could inevitably “hear” the tune and even the words to the song (perhaps even a “full orchestration, complete with rich harmonies between string, winds, brass, and human voice”), the listeners were limited to “an aperiodic series of taps” (Ross & Ward (1996, p. 114). Indeed, it was difficult from the listener’s perspective to even tell “whether the brief, irregular moments of silence between taps should be construed as sustained notes, as musical “rests” between notes, or as mere interruptions as the tapper contemplates the “music” to come next” (p. 114). So rich was the phenomenology of the tappers, however, that it was difficult for them to set it aside when assessing the objective stimuli available to listeners. As a result, tappers assumed that what was obvious to them (the identity of the song) would be obvious to their audience."

The above citation comes from a recent research article that documents what I call the Angry Email syndrome - basically, that people who read emails surprisingly often misinterpret the emotional tone of the message, and most often in a bad way. Read an abstract of the survey, or download the survey itself (in PDF).