Originally published on Medium on December 29, 2018.

Background: I spent about 7 years working on one of the backends that powered, among other things, part of Google+. Much of that time (5 years) I owned a data migration to deal with technical debt that came out of the original implementation. Although G+ is not the only source of these musings, its impending turndown was top of mind as I wrote. That said, I have no insight into the actual turndown of G+ and have been off of that team for 2 years now.

Let’s take a break from our regularly scheduled musings on ethics and society to think about software engineering.

We all know that we should design maintainable systems. But what does that mean? For non-mission critical consumer products, here’s one perspective: Design for mild success.

If we start with the assumption that our product is going to be wildly successful, we will likely commit at least one of over-engineering or taking too many shortcuts. When we over-engineer, we build a system that is ready to enable the features we imagine now but can’t build yet. When we take shortcuts, we build things in a way that works today but relies on a complex and brittle set of assumptions. Seemingly opposites, a common assumption behind both of these sins of software engineering is that there will be time and resources invested into the code later.

But chances are, the product will not be wildly successful. Maybe it will be a complete failure and we can delete the whole thing (although even a good cleanup can take a long time — that 5-year data migration I mentioned took another two years to clean-up the old system).

If the product manages not to fail, it will most likely be mildly successful. We will have created something with real value in limited circumstances or for a small set of users. We won’t want to kill the product, but we will have a hard time justifying an engineering team to clean up those hacks and implement all of those good ideas we planned for (plus, we were wrong about what users would want).

Now those over-engineered classes and workaround hacks start to call in their debt. Products are only worth keeping as long as the benefits (to us and our users) outweigh the costs. Sadly, since our mildly successful system was engineered to require an unjustifiable ongoing investment, the cost does not justify the benefit.

Where does that leave us? With a useful and valued product that is a drag on our team. We have a system that’s disheartening to work on because whoever ends up paying the maintenance cost has to run just to stay in place given the technical debt they were burdened with.

Now we have a choice: keep paying the cost of maintenance or turn down the product and pay the cost in the goodwill of your users. You cannot escape the payment.

So remember to engineer for mild success. Design a system that is easy to maintain and solves the problems you need to solve today. Generalize when it becomes a net saving (even though it will be incrementally more expensive). Be specific, but not hacky. And remember, you always pay a price for tech debt. Like with debt in the real economy, the question is only whether or not the overall growth reduces the relative cost of the payment.

Originally published on Medium on October 6, 2018.

Over on Google+ Robert Hansen gracefully offered an opportunity for folks against the Kavanaugh nomination to share their perspectives. This is my response (lightly edited for the different forum).

I am going to start with what seems at first like a non sequitur. I am a fairly senior engineer at Google. We are famous (infamous) for our standards in hiring. This extends to promotion decisions too. I am active both in the hiring process and the promotion process.

The standard we use is that if the answer to a hiring or promotion decision is not clearly yes, then it is no. Balancing this is that we must always evaluate candidates relative to the requirements of the role. So we have a bar, and candidates must be clearly above that bar. They needn’t be perfect, but if the candidate is sitting on the line in too many areas, then the uncertainty in the evaluation process will start to bring up the worry that some of those areas would actually come out under the bar if we knew the true signal.

Now, where I am going with this is not “it’s just a job interview”. Rather, it is to frame what I am about to say about Kavanaugh’s qualifications.

One more bit of framing. Remember what I said about comparing against the bar? The qualifications for being on the Supreme Court do not require that I agree with someone’s views for them to be qualified. Before the accusations, I was supportive of Kavanaugh. Tepidly so, in the manner of one accepting a technicality, but still supportive. Some may interpret this as meaning that I would be willing to take any excuse to rescind that support. I think the more important thing to take from this is that I legitimately changed my mind as part of this process.

There are two key areas where I feel that Kavanaugh is decidedly borderline. By this, I really do mean borderline. This is not a case where we can say that he is clearly unqualified. He is floating right on the line for me.

Since it was a recent topic of discussion, and the one that pushed me over the edge, I will start with disposition. I was disappointed by Kavanaugh’s demeanor during the Senate hearing. I agree with the folks who say that it would be unrealistic of him to show no emotion, but there is showing emotion — even strong passionate emotion — and there is letting emotion control you. This is an entirely subjective standard, but I believe that Kavanaugh was on the “controlled by emotion” side of the line. If his had been an unprepared statement, I might judge it differently, but he had the opportunity to prepare.

One more bit on this. I am going to bring up gender dynamics. Note that what I am not saying that there would have been a different standard used if a woman had shown this level of emotion in that position. Maybe a woman would have been accused of being hysterical rather than righteously angry, and maybe not. Instead, what I observe is this: women are judged harshly for showing their emotions in professional circumstances. Thus, from my perspective, the level of control I ask of Kavanaugh does not seem unrealistic. It seems like what society asks of me and others like me every day.

The second area where I see Kavanaugh as borderline relates to the accusation itself. I do not think we can say that he definitely sexually assaulted Blasey Ford. However, I do think that there is enough suggestive evidence that we can reasonably doubt his claims of innocence. To be pretend precise, I would give this accusation around 50% chance of being true with wide error bars. Let’s say a 25%-75% range (remember, made up numbers). Given this uncertainty, why do I feel this is enough to make my assessment of Kavanaugh’s qualifications borderline?

It is not, contrary to what many others feel, because he may have committed sexual assault. It is because he may have committed sexual assault and never been brought to justice for it. I believe people can change. I also believe that teenagers can be damn stupid. I do not hold the mistakes of youth against someone.

However, suppose for just a moment that the accusations are true, then confirming Kavanaugh would mean putting on the highest court of the land someone who knowingly and intentionally failed to hold themselves up to the standard of justice that they are sworn to uphold. This would be a travesty, a mockery of the judicial branch and the rule of law.

We don’t live in a world where we know the accusation is true. We live in a world where there is a very significant change that it is false. But how much of a chance an I willing to take with the fundamental foundation of justice? Even the low end of my falsely precise range is too high a chance to take with this sort of decision.

Thus, I see two major areas of borderline qualification and that, given the consequences of being wrong on this appointment, is why I cannot support Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Originally published on Google+ on October 5, 2018.

A couple months ago I synthesized ideas that stuck in my head after reading articles about cultural appropriation and settled on what has my personal go-to definition.

Cultural appropriation occurs when someone takes something — a symbol, activity, way of speaking, etc. — that needs to be received and uses out without having been granted it (by someone who has the authority to grant it). This can be lightweight. It is cultural appropriation to wear a Christian cross without belief, but the ritual to earn the right to wear it is (for many modern Protestants, at least) private confession of belief before God.

Note what this definition does not include. It does not say that someone has to be a member of a culture too earn the use of the cultural marker. It also includes the possibility of cultural appropriation by those within the culture (although we might call it something different then). And the bit of culture must have earned significance. Wearing everyday clothing from a culture is generally not cultural appropriation. What matters is that a cultural marker must signify that a person earned it. Appropriation occurs when it is used without having been earned.

There are still grey areas. Over time, the meaning and use of a cultural marker can change. When does it lose its significance? Who can make such changes authentically? Different groups may use the cultural marker with different standards such that one group may consider the other to be culturally appropriating the marker. Who owns a cultural marker?

As we go into Halloween, it is worth pointing out another complication of cultural appropriation. Depending on the cultural marker, the culture, and the way it is used, it may be sometimes appropriate to use the cultural marker as long as the usage is clearly signaled as imitation. Such imitation is often encouraged when it takes the form of play by children who are expected to eventually earn the marker. Intentional critical commentary can also be appropriate. A rule of thumb is to ask oneself whether the use of the cultural marker respects the significance of the marker or if it ignores it. The key thing here is that it is the significance of the marker that needs to be respected, not the marker itself. Even mocking criticism can meet this bar if it is intentional rather than incidental.

And even with this definition, there is room for plenty of fuzzy lines and grey area. Group interactions are hard.

Originally published on Medium on September 15, 2018.

In Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, Silver discusses a metaphor of the fox. The basic metaphor came from a fragment of writing by a Greek poet, Archilochus: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.” This concept was expanded on in a well known essay by Isaiah Berlin (which I’ve never read) and then has since been widely used in many contexts. (Background info from Wikipedia.)

The two uses of this metaphor that I am most familiar with are from Jim Collins’ Good To Great and from Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. These make an interesting contrast. Both use the metaphor to good effect, yet they come to opposite conclusions on which animal we should emulate.

It is important not to read too much into this difference. This is just a metaphor, and metaphors are meant to highlight concepts, not replace them. Yet I find it interesting to compare these two metaphors and see why they come to favor different animals. It tells us something about both.

In Good To Great, the hedgehog represents focus. In particular, it represents a big, ambitious, stable goal that a company or person aims to accomplish. The hedgehog recognizes that if we are always changing direction, then we will never reach our goal. Goals require time and they require focus. The fox represents goals that are always shifting based on a changing external environment. In this metaphor, foxes do not only react to changes, they overreact. The fox is always going after the Next Big Thing and never sticking with it long enough to achieve success.

In The Signal and the Noise the hedgehog represents a Grand Narrative. In particular, the hedgehog sees all predictions of the future and interpretations of the past and present through the lens of their Narrative. They are excessively confident in their predictions and in the ultimate fit of reality to their vision. The fox represents flexibility. The fox has a model. They constantly update that model in light of new evidence. If the model does not fit the data, then it is the model that needs to go, not the data. Foxes expect the world to be complex, ambiguous, and unpredictable.

As noted above, one way to resolve this is to just say that these are different uses of the same metaphor and move on. However, I think that this difference tells us something slightly deeper. Being a hedgehog, having one big idea which shapes what we do, is useful when we are setting and working toward a goal. Being a fox, looking at the world through the lens of many small, shifting ideas, is useful when we are interpreting or predicting reality.

This can, approximately, be summed up by another of the principles from Good To Great: Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith). To use Silver’s and Collins’ metaphors in ways that they did not intend, we should call on our fox like tendencies to face the facts, especially when those fact fail to fit our overarching narrative. We should call on our hedgehog tendencies to keep faith and focus even in the face of brutal facts which bring into question the specific actions we are taking to reach our goal.

On a more personal note, when it comes to debates — which are usually more about prediction and interpretation than goals and vision — hedgehog tendencies are one of the most frustrating personality traits to deal with. The debating fox may, at their worst, never stick with one idea enough to develop a thread of conversation. The debating hedgehog, at their worse, stubbornly refuses to see the facts through anything other than their chosen lens. They may fail to acknowledge that they are looking at the world through a particular lens. You cannot debate a hedgehog — not really — because they will always pigeonhole you into to whatever tidy box fits their narrative. The fox’s conclusions are messier, but the fox is generally willing to change their mind given enough evidence. They are much better discussion partners.

Originally published on Medium on August 18, 2018.

I read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In at the start of my second year as a technical lead and people manager. I thought it was a great, practical guide about how to succeed as a woman leader in business. I knew it was somewhat controversial, but it was not until I was looking at other reviews before writing my own that I realized that many feminists hate Sandberg’s message. This example from the Wikipedia article about the book is representative:

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi argues that self-described feminist Sandberg’s message of women’s workplace empowerment is actually a corporate-backed campaign that encourages women to promote themselves individually as “marketable consumer object[s]” for professional advancement, while discouraging solidarity and downplaying the damaging effects of systemic gender bias felt collectively by women in the workplace.

This is the first time that I experienced the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” standard that successful women — and minorities of all kinds — experience.

To be successful in an area that has traditionally been hostile to a minority often requires working within the dominant culture. Often this means working twice as hard for half the credit. It means ignoring the slights (and often worse) that “everyone” has to put up with and yet somehow come more often to those of us that do not look the part. It means dealing with the fact that leaders are expected to be assertive but assertive women are considered bitches; women must be nice, and nice for a woman means passive. For me — and I have had a thankfully easy time compared to many women — it has meant developing the ability to be what I naturally consider blunt or even brusque to be heard equally. Some people come to believe — incorrectly in my experience — that success requires being to be willing to throw others of your group under the bus as quickly as the dominant culture would be willing to throw them under. Those in the last category are rightly criticized. (Since I opened the post with it, I will note that Lean In does not at all advocate throwing anyone under the bus. Its tone — the tone that made me appreciate the book — is “Yes, the world is going to be against you. Here’s how to succeed despite that.”)

As a consequence of their working within the dominant culture, when someone does experience success they often have it held against them by members of their group. They have betrayed that group because their success required being agreeable to the group in power rather than destroying the very real systemic inequalities which make bowing down before a narrow dominant culture a necessity for success in some environments. Yet at the same time, the lack of representation of the minority in the field which the dominant culture acts as a gatekeeper for is decried.

What this does not recognize is that members of minorities have not thrown off injustice by achieving success. To shift from gender, the domain of my experience, to race, Colin Kaepernick illustrates that speaking as a black athlete puts him back in a position of subordination with threats from on high. Criticisms of Marissa Mayer’s decisions as an executive can be fairly discussed, but she receives much more vocal criticism than comparable male executives, especially for her parenting choices. Minorities who achieve success in dominant cultures which do not value their identity achieve that success only as long as they are willing to leave their identity at the door.

Let me be clear: I want to live in a world where no one has to bow to the dominant paradigm to be successful — or even just get by. I want to do what I can to get us there. And I believe that having some people reach success in today’s world is a necessary (but far far from sufficient) precondition to this happening. Massive culture change is needed, but that change will not happen if the only pressures are from the outside. Inside pressure needs to complement it.

To end on a personal note, I have seen things changing for women in tech and I have hope for the future. When I graduated from college in 2004, women in tech wanted to live in a world where being a woman in tech did not require pushing through artificial barriers that were not put up in front of our male colleagues, but that world seemed remote. Today, there is a sense that we can achieve equity. Because of this, the sense of frustration is more palpable; it is sometimes easier to reconcile yourself to a lack of progress (at least, if you were one of the few who survived) than it is to reconcile yourself to change that seems to move backwards as often as it moves forward. Yet coupled with that sense of frustration is a greater sense of hope. Change is happening, however slowly, however incrementally. Perhaps, maybe, no guarantees we can eventually get there.

Originally published on Medium on July 27, 2018.

I’m going to start and end with a caveat: what follows is tactical advice regarding evaluating how things we say might be perceived.

Communicating effectively is hard. Even with the best of intentions and the most careful of phrasings, some conversations get mired in misunderstanding.

Sometimes, what we thought was a perfectly reasonable — or even obvious — statement becomes a point of contention. A particularly fraught source of misunderstanding is statements about members of a group. How can we avoid saying things that might be perceived as unfair generalizations? To some degree, we can’t. If someone is looking to be offended, they will find ways to be offended (and this is true regardless of their or your particular beliefs).

Still, we can look for things that are likely to be interpreted negatively. One technique is that every time a group is referred to, even if there are modifiers limiting the scope of the statement, you can mentally substitute another group, preferably one that you are more acutely aware of when you are on the receiving end of the communication. For example, if a statement about white men would feel like stereotyping if it were about black women (regardless of the inaccuracy of the post-substitution statement), then it is likely to be perceived as potentially problematic. If, on the other hand, it would sound inoffensive no matter what group it is about, then it is probably fine.

When possible, I try to avoid using group labels and instead focus on behavior patterns. Whether or not that works depends, to some degree, on the topic under discussion. Even when a group is directly the topic of discussion, focusing on behavior is still useful. It helps to avoid the problem where a group label becomes shorthand for a set of properties that may or may not be what is intended by the writer. “We all know how white men are.” No, no we do not. And even if we could, we would not all know what facet of this bag of properties is relevant to the discussion at hand.

One way to make this more concrete, is to use the Situation-Behavior-Impact model developed by the Center for Creative Leadership and described in this article. In this model, feedback is grounded in a description of a situation where a problem occurs, the behavior that is problematic, and the impact of the behavior. This need not be belabored: “When two people are discussing a topic [situation] and one starts giving an explanation before verifying whether or not it is needed [behavior], then the explainer sets up expectations about a hierarchy of expertise which may not match reality [impact].”

In practice, not every statement you make will be precisely communicated. However, by testing how statements sound when we swap out group labels and by concentrating on behavior over labels, we can avoid some common sources of misunderstanding.

And once again, this is tactical advice regarding evaluating how things we say might be perceived. It is in no way meant to draw equivalences between the different groups we might make statements about.

The title comes from the Robert Burns poem, To A Louse.

Originally published on Medium on July 27, 2018.

Common advice says that if you want to be a strong communicator, don’t use caveats. The reality is more complicated.

As a technical lead and a people manager, I often end up intentionally using the sort of caveated[1] language that, earlier in my career, I tried hard to expunge from my speech. Standard career advice for those early in their career says that you should purge from your speaking and writing phrases like “I think” or “It might be useful to” and other phrases which make you sound less confident. This doesn’t mean communicating as if you think you are always right. Rather, it’s to take as a given that people know that you are giving your view and will have no problem letting you know if they disagree[2].

Yet as a leader, especially as a manager, it is useful to pull out those phrases again. Even in a culture where individual contributors have a pretty large amount of discretion over what and how they do things, it is easy for a leader’s suggestion to be taken more seriously than intended. I don’t think that folks on my team take their manager’s word as command — thank goodness. However, it still is received differently that a suggestion from a peer.

Thus, now that I am a lead, when I make a suggestion, I use those caveated phrases. Not to indicate that I am less confident — although, often my distance from the details mean I am less confident in my suggestions — but primarily to communicate that ownership of the decision still belongs to the person I am talking to. My use of language isn’t exactly the same as in my days as a new software engineer. There are important differences between communicating a lack of confidence and delegating authority. Still, it is interesting to reflect that our communication style needs are always changing as our role and context changes.

Building on that, I have spent some time thinking about when caveating is useful and when it is not.

Never caveat

Never caveat your state of mind unless you are truly uncertain. For example, don’t say, “I think I agree”. Unless you really are still thinking about it, this type of caveating just makes it sound like you do not know your own mind. This is the classic case of self-undermining and, in my experience, what people are warning against when they say not to caveat. (Important exception: “I think I understand what you’re saying” because that is really a statement about both your state of mind and someone else’s.)

You also should never caveat statements of fact. But we have to be careful here, because in these days of ideologically based “facts”, it can be easy for opinions to masquerade as facts. More on that shortly.

Optionally caveat

Clear statements of opinion do not always need to have an explicit caveat when given in a neutral or positive context. If I say, “This oatmeal is delicious” then, most of the time, people will understand that I am stating an opinion. Alternately, this could also be caveated to no harm.

Always caveat

It is difficult to over caveat statements of opinion given in a negative context. This could be a normally neutral comment in the context of a disagreement. For example, my love of the oatmeal can become a point of contention if we are discussing how to reduce breakfast options in the cafe down to one.

Another type of opinion in a negative context is when the opinion is likely to create a negative context even if there wasn’t one before. For example, in this age of high tensions on political topics, throwing in some extra caveats is useful even if the discussion isn’t an argument… yet.

Another type of statement you should always caveat is opinions which could be taken as facts. Often, these opinions are well informed enough that it seems almost inappropriate to call them opinions. But when you dig beyond the surface, you start to see that they are not incontrovertible facts. The role of saturated fats in heart disease falls into this category. Not that long ago, it was so widely believed that it might seem to be a fact, but the underlying evidence was not as strong as believed and has come into question more recently.

Thus, while I said above that you should never caveat facts, that is with the caveat that the set of facts should be pretty strictly limited to cases where there is no controversy or the controversy that exists is implausible — e.g., the Earth is round.

Variable caveating

Advice and recommendations are an interesting type of statement because they involve saying that someone else should change their behavior. This makes them automatically more sensitive. Like with descriptive statements, advice and recommendations given in a negative context or likely to produce a negative context generally benefit from caveats.

In a positive or neutral context, my advice is more nuanced, as the opening noted. When you are in a position of power, you should caveat if the recommendation is optional and not caveat if it is not optional. If you are making a recommendation to someone in a position of power, you generally should not caveat in positive or neutral contexts because — fairly or not — it will tend to be seen as self-undermining. When there isn’t a power differential, then it will vary based on context and caveats are often discretionary.

And, 900 words later, we see why this is usually summarized with the less nuanced but more memorable, “Don’t caveat unless it reflects true uncertainty.” 🙂

[1] Yes, I’m using caveat as a verb and will do so heavily throughout this post.

[2] As an aside, I don’t tend to change my communication style much for personal and work communication. At work, I am considered a fairly considerate communicator and in my family, I am considered quite blunt. This amuses me.

Originally published on Medium on July 13, 2018.

The paper “A Model of Reference-Dependent Preferences” by Botond Koszegi and Matthew Rabin discusses the role of expectations in determining economic utility. By explicitly modeling expectations, various “irrational” human behaviors can be explained. I read the freely available draft; this is the purchase-requiring published version. What follows is a detailed but non-technical summary.

Traditional economic models evaluate outcomes based on consumption utility. In this paper, the authors model utility as a function of both the consumption utility of an outcome and the utility of that outcome relative to the expectations of the actor. The authors assume the expectations are rational: they are an accurate probabilistic representation of both the possible outcomes and the utility the actor would derive from each outcome. Even under these strict assumptions, the model predicts various experimental outcomes better than models which take just consumption utility into account and better than models which assume that reference based utility is relative to the status quo rather than expectations.

More concretely, the utility of an outcome is defined as the sum of the actual consumption utility of that outcome and the gain-loss utility of that outcome. The gain-loss utility is the probability weighed sum over all expectations of a utility function applied to the difference between the consumption utilities of the actual outcome and the expectation.

For example, if I expected

• $0 with 25% probability
• $50 with 25% probability
• $100 dollars with 50% probability

and I won $50, my utility, translated into dollars, would be

• $50 [consumption] + (0.25($50-$0) + 0.25($50-$50) + 0.50($50-$100)) [gain-loss] 
  = $50 + $12.5 + $0 + -$25 
  = $37.50.

In other words, the utility of the $50 would be decreased because I had a strong expectation of winning $100. If, on the other hand, I had more strongly expected to win nothing, than the utility of the $50 would be increased by my sense of gain relative to my expectation.

My example above assumed a linear gain-loss utility function: the utility of a gain relative expectations is equal to the utility of an equal sized loss relative to expectations. In practice, the authors build loss expectation into their model. They assume that the utility function has negative utility for losses greater than the positive utility of equally sized gains. They also assume, however, that this effect is more pronounced for smaller losses/gains relative to expectations and that for larger losses and gains, the relative consumption utilities dominate any loss aversion. Thus, this model does not explain loss aversion.

Although the authors do not discuss this, I believe this model puts loss aversion on a more solid footing than it traditionally sits on. This model does not say that a loss is worse than a gain. It says that a loss relative to your expectations is worse than a gain relative to those expectations. In other words, it says that not having your expectations met is worse than having your expectations exceeded. This seems more psychologically defensible than saying that losses are, axiomatically, worse than gains.

Much of the paper is devoted to discussing the consequences of this model. In deterministic environments, the consumption utility and actual utility will always match because the gain-loss factor will always be (1.0*0) — complete certainty that there is no difference between the outcome and the expectation. However, in non-deterministic environments, consumption utility can vary from actual utility.

Another interesting consequence is that having expectations can leave us worse off than having no expectations. Someone with no expectations will always see any gain as positive. Someone with expectations (that they might have gained more) may see a gain as a loss. (Of course, they may also see a loss as a gain, so it’s all relative.)

Although the authors do not discuss it, this is applicable to situations like the ultimatum game. In this experiment, the proposer gets some amount of money and they offer some to a responder. If the responder takes the offer, they both get the money. If the responder doesn’t accept, neither gets the money. Since the alternative is nothing, a traditional economic model would predict that the responder would take any amount greater than zero. In practice, responders want much more fair amounts. Why they expect this has been discussed at length, but the relevance to this paper is that the responder has an expectation that they will get more and evaluate the outcomes based on this expectation.

This model also predicts a status quo bias. In the face of certainty, the model predicts that people are always willing to abandon their current reference point for an alternative that has a probabilistic expectation that is even marginally better. However, in the face of uncertainty, the expectation of the status quo is that you will continue having what you had already and the chance of ending up either worse off or better will be weighed against that expectation. For example, compare having $50 with betting that on a 75% chance of getting nothing and a 25% chance of getting $204. According to traditional expectations, (0.75*$0 + 0.25*$204) = $51 and so the bet is worth taking with a gain of $1. However, in a world where outcomes are evaluated relative to expectations and losses weigh more than gains (say, gains are worth only 90% of a loss), the expected gain comes out to

• (0.75($0-$50) + 0.25($204-$50)0.90)
• = -$37.5 + $34.65
• = -$2.85

and so the bet is not worth taking.

The endowment effect is when someone seems to ascribe more value to something because they own it. The canonical experimental setup is that someone is asked how much they would pay for something, like a mug (hence the photo), then given a mug, then asked how much they would sell it for. Often, people set a higher price for selling something they have been given than they had set for buying. However, this effect is not consistent; some experimental setups do not show this effect. The authors argue that when someone is given an object, they start forming expectations which are based on their continued possession of that object. If they are given the object with the expectation that they’ll be selling it, their expectations will shift and their valuation will not show the endowment effect.

This model also explains how people may come to spend more on an item than the consumption value they will get from it. Essentially, once you expect to get something, that feeds back into how much you are willing to pay for it because the value of the item to you is not just the consumption utility of acquiring the item, it is also how much you are willing to pay to avoid the missed expectation of not getting the item. The more you expect to get the item — the greater the loss from not getting it — the more you are willing to pay.

An odd variant of this is that the consumer’s demand for an item based on price is not, as classically assumed, a function based on only the price. Changing the price changes rational expectations about the price at which the object can be acquired which shifts the demand. Price and demand is a feedback loop, not a static function. Concretely, if a consumer is willing to buy shoes at price $X and then sees that they are on sale for 50% off, they may no longer be willing to buy the shoes at price $X. Alternately, a consumer may not have been willing to buy shoes at price $Y, but if they see that $Y is actually 50% off the full price, their expectations shift and they may see buying the shoes at $Y as a gain… as anyone who has ever bought something “because it was on sale” knows.

Another example the authors work through is whether or not increased wages decrease willingness to work. Their model predicts that increased wages will decrease someone’s willingness to work if those increased wages meet the worker’s wage expectations more quickly but not if it causes them to change their expectations. To put it another way, someone who expected to earn $200 in a day but instead earned it in half a day will not be inclined to work more. However, if they expected the day to be busy and adjusted their expectations accordingly — say, to $400 for the day — then they will be willing to work more. Thus, it is not higher wages that affect willingness to work. It is actual wages relative to expected wages.

Although this is a simplified model of how expectations affect utility, building expectations into the economic model still does a lot to make the modeled outcomes better reflect reality. In my view, this further supports the idea that when humans act “irrationally” relative to behavioral models, it is much more likely that the models are missing critical factors than that humans are truly as lacking in rationality as is sometimes implied.

Originally published on Medium on July 1, 2018.

First, the caveat. I’m a fan of thoughtful gun control proposals. I want them to be effective and consistent with legal understanding of the second amendment — otherwise, they are unlikely to withstand scrutiny. I accept the second amendment as the law of the land, although I would not object if it could be removed without tearing the country violently apart. However, I do not get the second amendment; arguments that guns are needed for liberty leave me unmoved. So when I make the analogy I’m about to make, know that I’m not making it as a gun rights advocate.

Abortion rights, pretty broad ones, are the law of the land. Yet there are women who get abortions for problematic reasons. Too many women get abortions because they feel that their economic or family situation does not allow them to keep a pregnancy they would otherwise choose to keep. We should all be able to agree that this is a problem. Pro-life legislation often uses these problems as a starting point. These laws are often passed with the stated intent of wanting to help women be medically safer or help them avoid making a decision they will regret.

However, those of us who are pro-choice see these laws as attempts to chip away at abortion rights. We see these as a way to make it so that the right to an abortion exists on paper but not in practice. We see them as an attempt at an end run around the law of the land. We know that, even if the stated goal is sincere, the end goal of pro-life activists is to ban abortion. With such an end goal, intermediate proposals are suspect even when linked to ultimate ends that we can widely agree need to be improved.

Gun rights and abortion rights have enough substantial differences that one can logically feel differently about them — that one, your choice, is a monstrosity and the other a fundamental right. However, from a perspective of how proposed regulations interact with the law of the land, they are very similar. So for those folks who bristle at attempts to nibble away at abortion rights, consider that gun rights advocate have a similar feeling about gun control. This does not mean that there isn’t room for improvement in both. It’s just that it’s hard to take at face value proposals from someone whose underlying goal is to ban rather than improve.

We have a living system of laws, so we should not look at the law of the land as a static ending point. Yet we should not completely ignore it when it goes against our desires either. Such an approach is impractical, especially for proposed laws with a constitutional argument against them. More fundamentally, such an approach dilutes the legal standing of rights, which should worry us all. We should feel empowered to challenge laws—even those with a Constitutional basis — but we should not try to chip away at laws in ways that we would consider deceitfully undermining if used against a right we support.

I was writing a comment at work this morning, and I realized that, as a TLM, I end up intentionally using the sort of caveated language that, earlier in my career, I tried hard to expunge from my speech.

Let’s unpack that a little. It is standard career advice for those early in their career that we should purge from our speaking and writing phrases like “I think” or “It might be useful to” or other phrases which make you sound less confident. This doesn’t mean communicating as if you think you are always right. Rather, it’s to take as a given that people know that you are giving your view and will have no problem letting you know if they disagree[1].

Yet as a leader, especially as a manager, it is useful to pull out those phrases again. Even in a culture like Google’s where ICs have a pretty large amount of discretion over what and, especially, how they do things, it is easy for a leader’s suggestion to be taken more seriously than intended. I don’t think that folks at Google take their manager’s word as command — thank goodness. However, it still is received differently that a suggestion from a peer.

Thus, now that I am a lead, when I make a suggestion, I use those caveated phrases. Not to indicate that I am less confident — although, often my distance from the details mean I am less confident in my suggestions — but primarily to communicate that ownership of the decision still belongs to the person I am talking to.

My use of language isn’t exactly the same as in my days as a new SWE. There are important differences between communicating a lack of confidence and a delegation of authority. Still, it is interesting to reflect that our communication style needs are always changing as our role and context changes.

[1] As an aside, I don’t tend to change my communication style much for personal and work communication. At work, I am considered a fairly considerate communicator and in my family, I am considered quite blunt. This amuses me.