psychology¶

Back To My Mac, Confessions of a Reluctant Apostate

Rethinking Fanboyism

Two years after replacing my Apple Macbook Pro laptop with a Dell running Ubuntu Linux I'm going back to Apple. I moved away from Apple for a mixture of philosophical and practical reasons. One of the main reasons was my belief in the importance of a viable linux desktop operating system. The backflip came about because I feel happier when using Apple products. In my attempts to get away from Apple I think I've learned more about why they have been so successful.

Android was the Catalyst

I didn't get a smartphone until mid 2011 and even then it was mainly because the battery on my Nokia was needing to be charged nightly. I picked up an HTC Sensation and began hating it almost immediately. I'm usually pretty good at pointing out flaws but the HTC was a bit of a mystery to me. While I can list a few flaws (battery not lasting a day is one!) I just didn't like using it. After three months I decided to buy my first iPhone.

I Feel Love

So this is the fucked up thing. Within 30 minutes I was texting people to tell them how much I love my new iPhone. It may make me sound like a total fanboy but even while I was in the store I was bonding with the device. It feels wrong saying I love a machine but  at the same time I'm curious how it could elicit such emotions. I can only put it down to the design of both hardware and software.

The Cathedral and The Bazaar

Steve Jobs was the high priest at Apple. We're told he was obsessive about detail and that it was his way or the highway. Part of the reason I avoided getting an iPhone was the control exerted over the distribution of Apps through the App Store. I was surprised and disappointed by my first experience of the Android Marketplace. A search for "shopping list" returned hundreds of apps with no indication which were most downloaded or highly rated. Maybe you can't design an OS or phone by committee?

Get Out of my Way

If I'm going to be iPhone boy then life would be easier if I used OSX on my desktop.

It's been about 4 years since I last bought a new Macbook Pro. My efforts to avoid vendor lockin are now being replaced by efforts to avoid unproductive work (like debugging problems printing from Ubuntu 11.10). I want to get on with the fun stuff and OSX just seems to make the fun stuff so much easier.

So What Now for Freedom?

I was shocked earlier this year to hear a techie say he wouldn't care if the linux desktop went away because he's happy with OSX. My issue is that Apple could make OSX unpleasant at some point in the future and without a viable alternative to switch to we would just have to accept it.

I don't think me going back to Apple is going to make an ounce of difference to Linux but what would the world be like if everyone followed this path? I guess I'm no longer willing to sacrifice my own happiness trying to support this particular ideal.

Well Done Steve (and Company)

The iPhone and Macbook Pro are masterpieces. (I didn't mention I've had an iPad for the past 12 months and love it to bits). I tried to extract myself from this web of awesome production but have failed because they are so well designed. I would love to create something as compelling.

Wired to Care - Will Neuroscience Prove Jesus Right?

Humans, like the apes we evolved from, are social creatures. Cooperation has given survival advantages to our species. One interesting aspect of our wiring is empathy. It's been argued that this involves mirror neurons, which fire both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Whatever the cause, we feel other peoples feelings and therefore share in the benefits when we make someone feel better. Conversely, causing someone distress should give us unpleasant feelings. This seems like a simple yet effective system for social regulation that doesn't require modern (human) innovations like verbal language, law or religion.

So how can people still be cruel to other people if they're going to feel their emotions? Did we evolve a way to selectively shutdown this mechanism? If your tribe was under attack, surely it would be advantageous if your warriors could suppress empathic responses just long enough to beat your enemies to a pulp. You would want them to be re-enabled once the threat has gone though!

I think we have built in empathy circuit breakers that get activated when we see people we dislike. There may be other ways to suppress empathy such as "just following orders" but it's the identification of people as bad or an enemy that has me curious. Is this a major contributor to cruelty and callousness from otherwise kind individuals? Do we become 'selectively psychopathic' by shutting down an important part our 'humanity'?

Some advice I always had trouble comprehending was "love your enemies". It may turn out to be another way of saying, "don't disable your empathic mechanisms". While this may not be helpful advice for a soldier on a battlefield, it's probably good advice for us in our schools, workplaces and social gatherings.

I suspect a way to achieve this is not view anyone you deal with as 'bad guys' which reminds me of another quote attributed to Jesus, "Do not judge others".

There seems to be a fair bit of research going into modulation of empathic responses. I suspect there's a significant difference between the response of males and females to seeing a person being punished for wrongdoing. In the TV show The Shield, it's made very clear to you who the bad guy is in each episode and he usually gets a pounding by the end of it. My dad used to enjoy shows like The Professionals when I was a kid but my mum found the violence distressing. I wonder whether males, being the ones who probably had to defend the camp, developed the ability to 'reverse the polarity' on their empathic circuits and actually gain pleasure from seeing 'bad guys' suffer?

Perhaps avoiding the human tendency to judge others unfavourably can help us avoid triggering a survival mechanism which doesn't have a place in modern society and in doing so, allow us to act better toward one another.

Jesus must have given this a lot of thought.