Rory Sutherland’s 10 Rules of Alchemy

Rory Sutherland is a vice president at Ogilvy in the UK. His YouTube videos advertise and promote the powers of myth, emotion, creativity, and passion. He tells good stories. He nods to reason, logic, and rationality because those are the proof of known, workable solutions. Sutherland’s thesis is that if we have a problem now it must be logic-proof or it would already have been solved and would not now exist. 

This is my summary. I recommend that you watch the video for yourself with CC:Closed Captions on. 

Rory Sutherland’s 10 Rules of Alchemy

1. The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. When we narrow down all options to the single rational choice, if it fails, no one can be blamed because they followed the data and the model. In fact, problems often have multiple solutions, different alternatives for other people whose values are not our own. 
2. Do not design for the average. Look for the extreme. The average person will reject the unknown until other people make it a trend. Go for those other people.
3. It does not pay to be logical when everyone else is logical. To overcome your competition in the market, find the errors in their models and meet those needs. He points out that every military seeks to design and implement surprises. 
4. The nature of our intentions is the source of our internal tensions. His example is extreme though telling. His best hotel experience was in an East Berlin pad that must have been a police cell. If you were looking for a Ramada Inn you were going to be disappointed, but he wanted the experience of an East Berlin vacation and he was ecstatic. Know your true intentions and it will minimize your emotional tensions.
5. A flower is just a weed with an advertising budget. Nature rewards and invests in reproductive strategies that are effective, even when seemingly inefficient. 
6.  Logic kills off magic. The payoff for magic is the change in perception. Apple changed the perception of the computer. 
7. A good guess plus empirical observation is still science. You can have a lucky guess and be right. **See below.
8. Test the counter-intuitive things because nobody else will. Businesses must mainly follow the rational and logical and the data-driven because that is what is known to work. You still must set aside space—I take that to mean organizational as well as physical—to test random journeys.
9. Rationality is a tool. If it is your only tool, then you are playing golf with just one club.
10. Dare to be trivial. The butterfly effect is that a small change can have a large consequence. Add one sentence to the script of a call center and see what change it brings. 
11. Do not limit yourself to ten rules. Rational people are everyone else. So, if there is a problem not solved now, it is logic-proof or would not exist. Be creative.
12. Dare to look stupid. “Why do people dislike standing up on trains?” In fact, some prefer it for a moderate ride of 20 to 30 minutes because they have been sitting in a chair all day. If you notice, some people still stand even after sufficient seats have been vacated. For others, it might be the physical challenge of juggling one’s kit after you are already latched on to a pole. Ultimately, now we have privileged window seating perhaps with a tray or armrest and so on, and with others forced to stand in the middle with not much to do. He asks, what if, instead, we had rows of seats in the middle with the spaces near windows specially designed for restful standing, perhaps with cellphone chargers as well. Now, it looks different.
13. Create net utility with a multivariate choice. Give people choices that optimize or minimize more than one variable and in disproportion so that whatever the outcome for the individual, you bring less regret. This is adaptive preference formation, a narrative for the support of choices.

** (Rory Sutherland cites Paul Feyerabend in asserting that advances in science have not come from applications of the scientific method but from intuition and insight. What the postmodernists ignore and would have us ignore in their program against reason is that you can only prove that your intuitive insight is truly scientific by following the scientific method so that you first and then others can test and replicate your work. Otherwise, you have nothing. The flash of insight and awareness can only be a reward for the rational, logical, empirical, experiential modes of learning as the preparation for better understanding and, ultimately, therefore, material abundance.) 

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Remote Work Before Covid

Going through some boxes from the garage, I found this. You can tell from the PDA (personal digital assistant) in his hand, from the fax machine at his foot, the monitor and the camera that this is from 1995-2000. 

Ahead of the 237th conference of the American Astronomical Society this past January, they brought in a coach to deliver a presentation on how to work a virtual conference. In some ways, it is easier and better than a live conference. One basic reminder: Wear your half suit.

Even earlier, back before 1985, I got from IBM a directory of software developers. Many of the firms were small, one or two employees, with annual declared incomes of $100,000 (probably the minimum checkbox on a survey), and remote, in places like Idaho and Oregon. 

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ONE LIGHT SECOND 

TECHNICAL WRITER JOB DESCRIPTION

THE FUTURE OF MONEY

ARMADILLO CON 41 DAY 3

TECHNICAL WRITING: COMPLAINING AND EXPLAINING

“Never complain. Never explain.” is the unofficial motto of the British royal family. It expresses the stiff upper lip attitude which is stereotypical of the people of modern England. I am not sure how much of that we Americans inherited. The continent was settled (invaded) by malcontents who formalized the political structure of their society with a revolution, opening the land to others of their kind. So, we tend to complain a lot and explain even more, whether anyone wants to listen or not. 

Two years ago, my colleague, CJ, posted a comment in response to “The Origins of Technical Writing.”  I tend not to reply to comments, but I am working my way through the same sort of resistance on my present assignment.  CJ wrote: 

“I have a somewhat negative view of tech writing because they seem to just restate things verbosely. Sometimes there's a a button labelled Var Osc Mode. I look in the manual, and they've padded it: "The Var Osc Mode control toggles variable oscillator mode. " It's unlikely anyone who understands exactly what that means would not have understood by reading the button.” -- CJ December 18, 2017 at 7:08 AM

First, you never know who will be using your work and reading your explanations. That is why Scientific American follows the same inverted pyramid structure as The New York Times. The “5Ws and an H” provide an easy framework for the opening paragraph. From there, you have to explain from broad, general truths, down to the supportive details. When I write, whether it is about machinery, software, state government agency policies, numismatics, or astronomy, I want the reader to care about the consequences of this new information. 

 Second, you do not know how your invention will be applied, or how the reader intends to adapt the information. One of the consequences of technical progress is that scientific theories, new discoveries, and innovations find novel practices. Time-traveling back to 1920, how would you explain to an astronomer from Harvard that today's markets provide computer controlled telescopes to hobbyists for less than the relative cost of a trip in that time across the Atlantic by ship? The hobbyist astronomer today is not necessarily a computer programmer. 

Similarly, the clever search algorithm committed to Github could be used by a lawyer for a music publisher needing to search for studio performers who are owed royalty payments. The 21st century lawyer may well have learned programming in some earlier education, but without good internal documentation your routines will not become her methods.

Third, you do not know how your reader came to your language. English is the universal second language of Earth. I believe that by the middle of the century, Indian English will surpass the American vernacular in global popularity and therefore, ultimately, in technical writing. In the meantime, my focus is on North American English. I think about my readers who are immigrants from India, China, and Mexico. I write in the language they hear at work, on TV, and on the street. (See, Spoken American Grammar here.) However, my work is always grammatically correct because grammar provides the rules of language; and language determines how we think.

Fourth, you do not know the literacy level of your reader. English pushes the limits of vocabulary at almost one million words, having absorbed mulligatawny, moccasin, mullah, and mutton. I change the engineer’s “utilize” to everyone’s “use.” My worry is for the motivated but underpaid lone operator on a midnight shift. The engineer who knows how the Var Osc Mode functions is home asleep, enjoying the privileges of their false class consciousness as a white collar employee while someone else is on the front line and in the trench with a machine in a variably oscillating failure mode.

The reason that my user manual only defines var osc mode as “variable oscillating mode” and says nothing more is that the engineer does not consider it important enough to make time for me. I try to interview subject matter experts. They claim to be too busy. I recently had one engineer flat out refuse to put in writing what he just told me verbally, expecting me to have instantly memorized the pearls he was tossing. 

Recently, one of our field service engineers used MS Word Track Changes to make extensive notes in the margin. I thought that he could have just as easily put them into the body of the document in the first place. But the formatting failed when I cut-and-pasted them in. The previous engineer who designed the form must have invested many hours in tweaking MS-Word to get this to print out the way he wanted. It does look nice, printed on A4 paper. But it is unsupportable. The overbuilt formatting in the table cells is hard to use, hard to maintain, and hard to change. And in America, we use 8 ½ x 11 paper. That speaks to my role designing forms. 

The other side of that coin comes from the people who never got over the typewriter. They try to line up text using the spaces and tabs. I create a table and then turn the borders invisible. It looks nice; and it is easy to maintain. 

Moreover, our on-site technicians are as likely to use a tablet or a phone, rather than a desktop computer. I have been aware of that since 1990 when I published an article in Credit Union News about new platforms for computing. Hughes Aircraft was experimenting with a 1-inch screen worn on a headband. The little box projected a standard page. It would enable a technician to bring a service manual into a turbine engine without actually dragging a rack of manuals into the engine.

I came to technical writing by way of computer programming. I was on a database project at General Motors; and no one wanted to write the user manual. Having sold two small books and half a dozen magazine articles, I gave it a try. 

I never left programming completely. All computing is programming, even for Facebook. Through the 1980s, I tweaked the codes in WordPerfect and learned to set type with Donald Knuth’s TeX/LaTeX. TeX became SGML, the Standard Generalized Mark-up Language. SGML became HTML; and now we have XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, leading to YAML (yet another…). Most of the computer people I socialize with think that CSS is Cross-site scripting. But in my work, it is Cascading Style Sheets. We do not have them in MS-Word, but the concept is helpful when thinking about documentation across manuals and departments.

I can make MS-Word sit up and bark. And it’s a good thing that I can because the cliché that I hear when I try to explain how many extra hours, days, or months something will take is: “That’s OK. We have a budget for manpower, but we do not have any extra money for software.” 

What I really get paid for is the Index. Back in 1966, when Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, was released, I understood and appreciated the fact that the Index was written by a philosopher (Allan Gotthelf) following the epistemology of Objectivism. I have three copies of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Over the decades of my productive working life, I have worn them out by reading them and marking them up. 

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The Origins of Technical Writing

I never thought that technical writing had a special origin. I recognized the genre within non-fiction, because it is not history, for instance. If I had given it any thought earlier, I would have looked to the industrial revolution and to the explosion in science in the 19^th century. But I did not. Only last week, writing a memorandum on the tasks I proposed to take on, it occurred to me that there must be some seminal book(s) that launched the study and practice as a distinct program. No surprise, a few online searches led to some good resources and to some authoritative nonsense.

"The Surveyor's Transit" Appendix I in
Theory and Practice of Technical Writing
by Samuel Chandler Earle

The best old book that I found was Theory and Practice of Technical Writing by Samuel Chandler Earle, New York: MacMillan Company, 1911 (301 + vi pages). I borrowed it from the UT Library. It was still catalogued under the old Dewey Decimal system and stacked in a section that smelled more like a library than the library. After an introduction of three chapters in 49 pages on basic principles of good writing, Earle gives criticisms of 24 examples, from the surveyor’s transit to the involute gear. The examples are informative on their own merits, fascinating examples of machines and methods of a century ago; and Earle’s commentaries are positive.  

Not so good was Technical Writing, Second Edition, by T. A. Rickard, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1923 (337 + xii pages). (The first edition was 1920.) Rickard just gives examples of bad writing and explains why they are bad. He natters. He is not wrong, but neither is he helpful.

Technical Writing by
Sajitha Jayaprakash,
Himilaya Pub., 2008.

Both of those came up on an Internet search that pointed to an article on the history of technical writing from the website of Sajitha Jayaprakash (here). She is the author of several textbooks on the subject. She cites Rickard as the author of a previous work from 1908. I found a listing in Worldcat.org:  Rickard, T.A. (Thomas Arthur), 1864- Guide to technical writing. San Francisco, Mining and Scientific Pr., 1910. However, curiously perhaps, Jayaprakash says without further clarification: “Samuel Earle is hence considered to be the father of technical writing.” I agree that Earle does the better job, but Rickard preceded him. And I have no way to judge that first effort, though the second edition to the later publication does not hold much promise. I do believe that Rickard would have had harsh words for Jayaprakash who wrote: “Technical writing, as you know is systematic writing of instruction for the users to perform a given task. It is also about documenting information that users can use.”

The problem of when technical writing began as a separate classification rests on the fact that for 2500 years, just about all writing was technical. The Gilgamesh and Argonautica and other myths stood apart from the vast body of philosophy for which there was no clear distinction between living the good life and discovering the mating habits of cetaceans. It was all knowledge. It was presented as fact, or at least as argument, and there was no doubt that it was all intended to inform the reader about the world and their place in it.

What changed?

The Wikipedia article on Technical Writing points out: “However, unlike the past, where skills were handed down through oral traditions, no one besides the inventors knew how to use these new devices. Writing thus became the fastest and most effective way to disseminate information, and writers who could document these devices were desired.”

That claim is supported by an excellent article, “Constructing a Contextual History of English Language Technical Writing,” by Stephen Crabbe, Journal of Translation and Technical Communication Research, (Published by Leona Van Vaerenbergh and Klaus Schubert), Vol. 5. Nu. 1. (2012) Page 40, online here.)

Crabbe differentiates scientific writing from technical writing. The distinction is subtle. Aristotle on the parts of animals and Aristarchus on the motions of the planets were for the privileged few. More deeply, writing about the work of Eratosthenes of Cyrene in Circumference (reviewed here), Nicolas Nicastro asserted that as insightful as the ancient sages were, science was a modern invention. In that same context, Crabbe claims that technical writing originated with the Industrial Revolution.   

“However, it is generally accepted that the transition to factory-based, machine-powered industry can be traced to Britain during this period. The new machines could be invented, but workers with experience of constructing, operating and maintaining them did not exist. As a result, the pre-industrial oral tradition of passing technical knowledge from one generation to the next became less effective and relevant.

[…]

The Mechanics Institute was established in Glasgow in 1821, and its success resulted in the establishment of new institutes in rapid succession in towns and cities across Britain. Many leading manufacturers during the industrial revolution such as the Eastern Counties Railway, Royal Arsenal and George Stephenson and Company established new institutes. However, the purpose of much of this technical knowledge dissemination was not necessarily altruistic. Workers required instruction on how to operate the new mechanical inventions not for their protection, but for the protection of what were often expensive and complicated machines.

[…]

Manufacturers also needed workers who could construct and maintain the new mechanical inventions. Mokyr (2006) describes these workers as tens of thousands of literate mechanics and craftsmen who were able to understand technical writing and illustrations. The greater complexity of the new machines meant that oral descriptions of their parts were increasingly insufficient to enable mechanics and craftsmen to construct and maintain them.”

Be warned, though: That same Wikipedia article on Technical Writing also cites "A Brief History of Technical Communication" by Frederick M. O’Hara, Jr., of the Montana State University (Billings) College of Technology online here. That work is flawed by ideological and philosophical problems, but just empirically, O’Hara claims: 

“A case can be made that the first software documentation writer was Muhammad ibn Musa Al’Khowarizmi, a twelfth- century Tashkent cleric who developed the concept of writing a detailed process to be followed to achieve some goal, a technique employed in virtually all computer- programming languages today. He published a book about his approach and named his process the algorithm, a name that even today is used to refer to the mathematical application of this method.”

The truth is that the scholar did not give his own name to his method. The word “algorithm” comes from a Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi’s name. He may well have come from what we call Uzbekistan, but no source indicates that his family originated in Tashkent, an old city in eastern Uzbekistan that is the modern capital. Indeed, his origins were probably at the western margin in the place called Khiva (Xorasm; Khorasan). All we know is that he did truly work in Baghdad and lived about 780 to 850 CE (162 to 236 AH). And he wrote a book that we call The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing that was first translated into Latin by Robert of Chester in 1145. So, the book came into the West in the 12th century, but contrary to O'Hara's claim, the author lived some 350 years earlier.

Another common and erroneous assertion is that technical writing as we understand it began with us.  “However, most experts would agree that the golden age of technical writing started with the invention of the computer.

“1986: The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) released the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which became the basis of several subset markup languages, including HTML.” From “History of Technical Writing” by ProEdit, a contract and direct hire placement firm. The truth is that ANSI SGML was based on Donald Knuth’s TeX invented ten years earlier and enthusiastically adopted.  (See TUG the TeX User Group here.)

As noted at the opening, the earliest textbooks on technical writing apparently go back only to the beginning of the 20^th century. But Scientific American was founded in 1845, and despite (or perhaps thanks to) changes in ownership, it has remained the longest-running periodical in America.  

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Beware: Honda Cares

From the IntentionalPrivacy blog of Laurel Marotta: "In the meantime, my husband had taken our 2005 Honda into the same Austin, Texas, dealership to get it inspected because the power steering was making a noise. They resealed the power steering pump, and replaced the valve cover gasket and the cam plug. When he picked the car up and drove away, the engine light came on. He took it back and they charged him another $65 to tell him that an additional $670 was needed to replace the spark plugs and the induction coils. He went to an auto parts store and picked up four spark plugs for $52. When he pulled out the spark plugs, he found two springs under one of the spark plugs and none under one of the others."

She was referring to the induction coils over the spark plugs. Obviously, the mechanic just jammed everything back together.  The car ran rough, to say the least. It did not take much to remove the induction coil covers and see, and fix, the problem.

We used to own Toyotas, two Camrys and a Celica. Our friends with Hondas kept bragging about the customer service of their dealerships.  So, when it came time to get a new car, Laurel bought the Civic. We got along with one car for about five years. After we got resettled here, Laurel bought a new Accord. Her problems with that car are on her blog. It is not so much the car - 10,000 or 15,000 parts are what they are - but that the dealership cannot fix a cybernetic problem. Under Texas law, she can declare the car a lemon. She will probably just do what she did with her Ford Escort: put a big yellow lemon decal on it.

Over the years, I have worked for several multinational corporations. All that matters is the local office. And all that matters in the local office is your supervisor. Honda service might be the finest in the world, but here it seems lacking.

For myself, when we first got married, I kept our Ford Pintos running. One of them we bought used with 25,000 miles on it; and put another 50,000 on.  But I gave up being a shade tree mechanic when everything went electronic. No more setting rotors, or gapping the spark plugs. (She rebuilt the carburetor.)  As it turns out, cars are still just 19th century technology, so I will not hesitate to do what I can under the hood.

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One picture is worth 1000 words.

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Lest we forget ...

"We grew up together," said Gates, after Jobs's passing.
(Guardian UK from "Digital World" conference 2007.)

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