How much is the ball or Homo-not-very-Sapiens
So I decided to post another post from my blog to the attention of habrovchan…
The ball with the bat cost $ 1.10. A bat costs $ 1 more than a ball. How much is the ball?
While you are thinking about this problem, let me tell you why I brought it. I recently saw Mark Bukanan's speech - he is the one who found that any two people in the world know each other through a chain of no more than 6 people. He spoke about his new book “The Social Atom: why the rich get richer, they catch rogues, and your neighbor looks like you” (The Social Atom: Cheaters Get Caught, Your Neighbor Mark Buchanan, ISBN 978-1596910133)
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The main idea of the book is that many things in society occur not because of conscious and rational actions of people, but because of completely unconscious and irrational small actions that crawl into noticeable phenomena because of the structure of society. Like, for example, freezing water forms patterns on the window or snowflakes, or there stones on Grumant (also known as Spitsbergen) are arranged in neat rings on the ground, surrounding circles from the soil (also because of the freezing water, which is more in the soil and which expands when freezing).
One of the illustrations of his point of view was that in classical economic theories everything is built on the rational behavior of people, but that is why they often do not work. For example, from a rational point of view, the securities market cannot fluctuate on a scale with which it actually fluctuates. In one of the models, factors of panic and a few irrational beliefs of market participants were included and they received a much more consistent picture with reality. He has other examples. For example, it simulates a population of three different colors — orange, blue, and green — that inhabits a city, and it evenly inhabits it. Color is irrelevant, but each person is just a little bit! - prefers not to be in the extreme minority, for example, one sole representative of his color, if all the others are already of the same color. That is, orange, surrounded by green ones, is likely to move on occasion, or there, blue, surrounded by orange ones. Not that it breaks off right away, but if it changes jobs, and it turns out to be further, it will consider the question of moving closer to work much more seriously. It would seem nothing at all, right? It turns out that this is enough to turn the town into spots of the population of the same color in n years.
So, what am I talking about? And the fact that such structural phenomena, which depend not on people, but on the structure of society or a collective, manifests itself not only in macroeconomics, but also in microeconomics — inside firms and individual teams.
The most famous example is the product structure that follows the structure of the team that made it. Say, create the Infrastructure team and place an ambitious aggressive commander in its head, and your product will be full of pipes, air ducts, wires, taps ... Instead, create the User Convenience command and put it at the head of the same comrade that most of these pipes were not so necessary. By the way, Google solved this problem radically. They really have no bosses at all. That is, but each manages groups of 30 to 100 people, and each of the subordinates is “the army of one soldier” and he chooses which projects to join and work on. True, such a structure is also not without some problems.
Another example. Take a normal product development team from PMs, devs, testers, documentation writers, well, and mengers, of course, where to go without them ... Begin to evaluate the work of testers by the number of bugs they have discovered. Have you already guessed that before the review the number of opened bugs will increase dramatically? So far, I have not said anything structural, self-interest — a completely rational or at least understandable feeling within the framework of classical economic theories. However, it is clear that to declare that you open up bugs in order to increase your “counter” is an unequivocal “No way!” Even suspecting others of this kind of behavior is a terrible social sin that can be remembered. Therefore, the people amicably waving the flag “Quality is our helmsman!”, And some are even quite sincere, especially since you really want to make a good product, and not know what. So, it is absolutely amazing that even those testers who sincerely believe that the main thing for them is the quality of the product, and not their review, still increase the release of bugs "on the mountain" shortly before the review period. Moreover, nobody already uses the mechanical number of bugs, in the extreme case, bugs that were recognized by the team and repaired, but not resolved as By Design or Not Repro, are considered. Logical, right? However, the number of these bad bugs is also increasing. Moreover, the number of conflicts over bugs also increases, despite the fact that conflicts are almost always bad for the review, and an extra “fixed” bug does not seem to interfere with the developer either. It is impossible to explain either one or the other in the model of rational behavior of people, but as a structural element and the result of unconscious reactions (crowd instinct, team agiotage) is easy.
Yes, and Mark gave an example at the beginning in his lecture to illustrate the power of unconscious behavior in a person. Have you already counted how much the ball cost? Of course, 5 cents. However, subconsciously I want to say 10 cents. So, this question was asked to students of the University of Michigan and (uzhos ...) Princeton (!!!). Gave them 15 minutes (!!!) Half - 50% - answered 10 cents! I think the students were from the humanities, but still impressive.
The ball with the bat cost $ 1.10. A bat costs $ 1 more than a ball. How much is the ball?
While you are thinking about this problem, let me tell you why I brought it. I recently saw Mark Bukanan's speech - he is the one who found that any two people in the world know each other through a chain of no more than 6 people. He spoke about his new book “The Social Atom: why the rich get richer, they catch rogues, and your neighbor looks like you” (The Social Atom: Cheaters Get Caught, Your Neighbor Mark Buchanan, ISBN 978-1596910133)
')
The main idea of the book is that many things in society occur not because of conscious and rational actions of people, but because of completely unconscious and irrational small actions that crawl into noticeable phenomena because of the structure of society. Like, for example, freezing water forms patterns on the window or snowflakes, or there stones on Grumant (also known as Spitsbergen) are arranged in neat rings on the ground, surrounding circles from the soil (also because of the freezing water, which is more in the soil and which expands when freezing).
One of the illustrations of his point of view was that in classical economic theories everything is built on the rational behavior of people, but that is why they often do not work. For example, from a rational point of view, the securities market cannot fluctuate on a scale with which it actually fluctuates. In one of the models, factors of panic and a few irrational beliefs of market participants were included and they received a much more consistent picture with reality. He has other examples. For example, it simulates a population of three different colors — orange, blue, and green — that inhabits a city, and it evenly inhabits it. Color is irrelevant, but each person is just a little bit! - prefers not to be in the extreme minority, for example, one sole representative of his color, if all the others are already of the same color. That is, orange, surrounded by green ones, is likely to move on occasion, or there, blue, surrounded by orange ones. Not that it breaks off right away, but if it changes jobs, and it turns out to be further, it will consider the question of moving closer to work much more seriously. It would seem nothing at all, right? It turns out that this is enough to turn the town into spots of the population of the same color in n years.
So, what am I talking about? And the fact that such structural phenomena, which depend not on people, but on the structure of society or a collective, manifests itself not only in macroeconomics, but also in microeconomics — inside firms and individual teams.
The most famous example is the product structure that follows the structure of the team that made it. Say, create the Infrastructure team and place an ambitious aggressive commander in its head, and your product will be full of pipes, air ducts, wires, taps ... Instead, create the User Convenience command and put it at the head of the same comrade that most of these pipes were not so necessary. By the way, Google solved this problem radically. They really have no bosses at all. That is, but each manages groups of 30 to 100 people, and each of the subordinates is “the army of one soldier” and he chooses which projects to join and work on. True, such a structure is also not without some problems.
Another example. Take a normal product development team from PMs, devs, testers, documentation writers, well, and mengers, of course, where to go without them ... Begin to evaluate the work of testers by the number of bugs they have discovered. Have you already guessed that before the review the number of opened bugs will increase dramatically? So far, I have not said anything structural, self-interest — a completely rational or at least understandable feeling within the framework of classical economic theories. However, it is clear that to declare that you open up bugs in order to increase your “counter” is an unequivocal “No way!” Even suspecting others of this kind of behavior is a terrible social sin that can be remembered. Therefore, the people amicably waving the flag “Quality is our helmsman!”, And some are even quite sincere, especially since you really want to make a good product, and not know what. So, it is absolutely amazing that even those testers who sincerely believe that the main thing for them is the quality of the product, and not their review, still increase the release of bugs "on the mountain" shortly before the review period. Moreover, nobody already uses the mechanical number of bugs, in the extreme case, bugs that were recognized by the team and repaired, but not resolved as By Design or Not Repro, are considered. Logical, right? However, the number of these bad bugs is also increasing. Moreover, the number of conflicts over bugs also increases, despite the fact that conflicts are almost always bad for the review, and an extra “fixed” bug does not seem to interfere with the developer either. It is impossible to explain either one or the other in the model of rational behavior of people, but as a structural element and the result of unconscious reactions (crowd instinct, team agiotage) is easy.
Yes, and Mark gave an example at the beginning in his lecture to illustrate the power of unconscious behavior in a person. Have you already counted how much the ball cost? Of course, 5 cents. However, subconsciously I want to say 10 cents. So, this question was asked to students of the University of Michigan and (uzhos ...) Princeton (!!!). Gave them 15 minutes (!!!) Half - 50% - answered 10 cents! I think the students were from the humanities, but still impressive.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/11610/
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