Humans have a lot of defects. The Blame Reflex, and our innate "Us vs Them” pathology are two big ones. 

Our defects lead us to behaviours that aren't in civilisation's best interest, or even our own best interest. No single human's behaviour has been, or ever will be perfect. Every one of us behaves badly sometimes, as you might have noticed. 

Yet civilisation is improving. How is this possible?

Here's one explanation.

If you applied these 2 attributes – 'Good for the individual human', and 'Good for civilisation' – to all human behaviours in a big list, you'd wind up with four types of behaviour: 

1. Bad for everybody (B)
2. Good for the individual, bad for civilisation (GI)
3. Good for civilisation, bad for the individual (GC)
4. Good for everybody (G)

Bad for everybody (B) and Good for everybody (G) are easy. We all agree behaviours that are good for everyone should be maximised, and behaviours that are bad for everyone should be eliminated. That’s a consensus, and a fundamental factor in civilisation’s improvement. But it’s not the only factor. ​

Today Harvard Business Review (publishers of all manner of goodies at hbr.org) emailed me some sales material with the hardest-hitting subject line in the history of sales email subject lines. It was a thing of strangely cohesive abstract beauty, like Frankenstein's monster would be had he been sewn together from various and sundry chunks of Disney Princesses rather than local cadavers.

Here is Harvard Business Review's incredible email subject line:

That subject line is a rich vein of psychological sales gold. I counted 10 distinct psychological principles utilised in it. Maybe you can spot even more. Here are mine:

1. Get (a verb that triggers the "what's in it for me" mentality from the outset)
   
2. 7 (research shows people click numbered lists, as BuzzFeed will tell you)
   
3. Free (English language's most effective buzz word)
   
4. Gifts (another way of saying and reinforcing free, uses the power of repetition to sell)
   
5. When (not if or should, but when to indicate certitude)
   
6. You (personal pronoun, this is conversational language)
   
7. Subscribe (your call to action power verb)
   
8. and Save (second most effective buzz word)
   
9. Up to 80% (a statistic, triggering a sense of measured credibility)
   
10. (Bonus psychological principle: Jaden Smith Style First Letter Capitalisation Catches The Eye Like A News Headline!)
    

This is email list marketing at it's most thoroughly researched and deviously influential. I am richer for the experience.

If you'd like to learn more about how human psychological principles are veritably milked for their applications in clickbait, here's a clever one from Wired.com:

You’ll Be Outraged at How Easy It Was to Get You to Click on This Headline

Thanks for learning!
Michael

The existential fear of Artifical Intelligence, as defined by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and their peers, and published on FutureOfLife.org has merit. It's a "large scale existential risk". Read it. Sign it if you share these distinctly Asimovian concerns. They boil down the topic AI perfectly: "Our AI systems must do what we want them to do."

But what about the fear of job automation? The fear of "technological unemployment"?

No, that one is not a matter of existential risk. That's a matter of personal job security, DEFINITELY. Which is a problem in itself, but of a drastically lesser magnitude. The effects of large scale technological unemployment on an economy, however, is merely a catalyst for a very simple and (from a humanitarian viewpoint very overdue) change to capitalism.

It's a matter of existential change.

Maybe it feels like a big threat, after the sustained mass media onslaught we continue to endure. The fact that automation is by its nature an agent of change makes it irresistible for panic-mongers. There's even some overlap between the topics of AI and job automation: Artificial Intelligence precursor software already is a portion of the technology humans use to automate work.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that job technological unemployment is neither inherently good nor inherently bad.

This article substantiates this above claim. Point by point, we'll address every assumption fundamental to the fear of automation and technological unemployment as a "large scale existential risk".

We'll start with a quick understanding of the labor market.

The range of tasks that humans can do as work is as broad as the imagination. But all those tasks fit into two categories: Manual labor and Knowledge work.

A "job" is a set of tasks, of which some are manual and tasks that are knowledge work. The ratio determines if the job is "manual labor" or "knowledge work" but in fact all jobs contain both to some extent. Even jobs that are reliant on the use of expert knowledge still invariably require the movement of matter. Consider what a surgeon does with a scalpel, or an architect with a stylus, or a developer with a keyboard. Conversely, all manual labor requires the interpretation of instructions to action, and the ability to communicate; both by definition are knowledge work tasks.

So now we have a clear understanding of tasks, jobs, manual labor, and knowledge work. No doubt you can relate that to your own situation.

Losing a job you wanted to keep is a problem, no matter how it happens.

Whether all your tasks are more cheaply automated, or you're fired by some hostile, it can be a major problem for the worker.

But a worker losing a job isn't a problem for society as a whole. No matter how certain you are of it. If you're interested understanding the impact to society of the inevitable automation of all work -- and therefore all jobs -- you've come to the right place. We'll analyze every argument espousing automation as a social menace, and you'll also learn about a quantitative solution proposal for improving our primary means of resource allocation in a major contemporary economy, from being "work-based" to a measurably better model. The mathematics prove the financial viability of the solution using current federal data. It's open for discussion.

Assumptions derived from feelings are a poor substitute for a data-based world view. These assumptions don't stand a chance.

Let's get into it!

This attitude is short sighted. If it were true, technological unemployment would be Capitalist Armageddon brought on by the Four Horserobots of the Apocalypse.

Fortunately, the assumption is false.

It's also illogical and dangerous.

The assumption "work is the ONLY way to make income" is an example of taking a DESCRIPTIVE view of the world — in this case, describing that working in exchange for monetary remuneration is for many people the MOST AVAILABLE and sometimes the ONLY way to accrue money — and turning that description into a PRESCRIPTIVE view of a world in which the assumer believes everyone should live that way no matter what. It's an act of observing a situation and then trying to push that situation on everyone else without bothering to ask one crucial question: "is there a better situation?"

Or perhaps the logic is that since the assumer can't think of a better way, then the situation they're in must be the best one possible: "If I'm in this situation, everyone else should be too. I don't even care if there's a better way. We should do it my way because if other people have a better system but I got this worse system, well... THAT'S NOT FAIR ON ME. So we should all get my system so that everyone gets the same deal and that's fair on everyone. And everyone's experience should be consistent with MY experience because I'm already part way through having it and to change my system would be unfair on me."

Despite the obvious logic errors, this assumption stands against any improvement to the system. When a better system becomes available, owners of this assumption fight against it because they value "others not having more than I have" over "people who have the least having more than they do now".

Human work in exchange for resources is our current model in most of the world. That's a description of the situation. I just described it. This system of resource allocation is often called "Capitalism," and there is a lot of evidence suggesting it to be the best resource sharing system yet trialed in a human society for the purpose of resource allocation. Despite that possibility, the system is profoundly flawed, requires strict democratic influence to regulate, and has failed continuously to set a precedent in which all members of a society run on that system have enough resources on which to live. We have more than enough efficacy data from Capitalism in situ to know unequivocally that it is inadequate.

So if our best model is inadequate, what then? We'll modify it. Henceforth we'll refer to the system as "Hostile Capitalism" since it allows for humans to suffer and die for no other reason than having limited access to the resources they need (which is the bad part), while allowing corporations and individuals to profit in proportion to their work (which is good).

When automation makes human labor increasingly obsolete, there will be an increasing proportion of humans who are unable to accrue adequate resources on which to live if Hostile Capitalism is in effect. Logic tells us the system needs to be modified to ensure that inevitable change to civilisation is not calamitous. To be clear, we are talking about the poorest of us having a shot at survival. If you think "The percentage of humans with adequate access to survival-enabling resources" is NOT the primary metric of civilisation, then get back in your toilet. If you think that percentage is the primary qualitative measure of civilisation, or don't know and want more information before forming an opinion, read on for a quick tangent on Income Inequality.

Automation is therefore harshly and fundamentally at odds with our current capitalism model in which human labor is the primary way humans gain their living resources.

At first glance, it appears automation is set to screw up human resource allocation! Automation and capitalism appear to be in conflict.

Fighting automation is not the answer. That battle can never even be waged, let alone won. Stasis can never beat adaptiveness.

Nor should it, since resource allocation among humans need not FULLY depend on human labor. It can in part. Or not at all, as in the ancient-to-modern use case shared by beggars and monarchs.

Resources can be allocated among humans in other ways.

The automation of labor leads to both greater VOLUME of resources (compare yield of a $300,000 of crop harvester to the yield of $300,000 worth of human labor) but also greater VARIETY of resources (compare clothing availability in the period before the washing machine was invented, vs the period after washing machines became household appliances).

You can deduce from those effects that automation has on resources that automation makes the world better for humans to live in.

Fighting capitalism is not the answer either. For there can never be a consensus on the fair distribution of ALL resources. There is no precedent in human history. The "trickle down" of wealth demonstrably doesn't work.

Adapting capitalism is the answer. Remember, all that's needed is a minimum redistribution of resources that enable the survival of everyone. Not a redistribution of ALL resources like in some miserable socialist communist wasteland.

No. A portion of all resources -- like that accumulated in any democracy's tax system -- CAN be allocated fairly, and without altering the fundamental tenets of capitalism. Concepts like Universal Basic Income only require a portion of society's wealth to be implemented. In so doing, all humans gain sufficient resources on which to subsist, thus freeing them from their DEPENDENCE on labour to live.
The cost of this is increased taxation: a trivial price to pay to ensure that all children eat. But what portion is needed? That's a good problem to solve, and none but the most selfish mind would argue against it after seeing the viability of its mathematics. Which are as follows:

Here we see US Basic Income as a means to meet basic human needs is mathematically and financially viable right now in the year 2016.

Poverty can be eliminated from the USA at the cost of reallocating 40.39% of the nation's GDP. Today.

(You'll note the credibility of the data sources used in this exercise: World Bank. CIA World Factbook. US Federal Reserve. US Federal Census. All of it less than 1 year old. If you have better data, send it in and let's refactor. Maybe it will deviate from 40.39% as high as 41%! But if you want to verify these data sources, they're listed in the article's footer.)

So 40.39% of GDP reallocated to save the impoverished. We'll call this system "Benign Capitalism", because it does not allow humans to suffer and die for their lack of resources (which is good), while allowing corporations and individuals to generally profit in proportion to their work (also good).

In order to transition from "Hostile Capitalism" to "Benign Capitalism" nothing more than a taxation increase to 40% is needed to preserve Americans' quality of life. To achieve this any tax model can be used, as decided by elected officials chosen by the voting public.

The above equation is mathematical proof of the viability of Universal Basic Income as a means of ensuring every American adult's base needs are met.

But what effect would this have on automation?

The effect would be that the owners of companies would continue to profit. Demand for their products would remain generally unchanged, as the very core of capitalism remains unaltered. That 40% of the US's money isn't leaving the economy, it's just moving through a different channel -- one which by its nature guarantees most of it will continue to move, and not wind up sitting static in billionaires' personal surplus. Some producers would see greater profits as a result of there now being more consumers with money to spend in the market. Other producers would see profit diminish, as the higher taxation of their customers affected their ability to spend. The market would do what it always does: balance. And capitalism would continue -- this time with the sustained participation of ALL individuals in the society.

Automation, therefore, would continue. Businesses would be just as compelled to find cheaper automated solutions to labor needed in their production processes than human labor can offer. And humans would continue to work as and when they saw fit. More importantly, workers would find work they enjoyed, and feel less pressured to do work they dislike due to their basic income freeing them from the need to do work they dislike in order to live -- as is the reality for some of the humans in your community as you read these words.

This assumption is a grim one. It assumes that the work we, as individuals, might consider unenjoyable – like cleaning sewers, rubbish collection, or janitorial work – is so offensive to EVERY human that they all would rather it not be done than do it themselves.

In a resource allocation system like UBI where all humans receive enough money to live on, there will always be those who want more money than the minimum. Perhaps a minority, perhaps a majority. Or perhaps everyone, since humans are innately driven to fulfill their many and various desires. But just as human nature still applies, so too do the fundamental rules of capitalism. There is still manual human labor to be done. There are still jobs to do it that pay money. And there will therefore be humans willing to do the work.

It might be that the work for work broadly considered distasteful would pay more than it did in the Hostile Captialism system; in Benign Capitalism human labor has become a more valuable commodity, now that all humans are free to value their own time in the market without being forced to undervalue it in order to stave off death. Sewer-scraping, therefore, costs more money.

Humans will work for additional resources wherever they value the additional income over a portion of their free time. The labor market persists.

And so too does the onward march of exponential automation.

What jobs do you think will be automated foremost? The ones that fewer people want to do, which therefore cost more to employ humans to do, which therefore yield greater savings to the company buying the automation? Seems likely.

Again, let's reiterate: THE RULES OF CAPITALISM HAVEN'T GONE AWAY. Some humans will value their own labor higher than the market does, and get less work as a result. Some will sell their labor more cheaply and get more work. The market will balance, and the work will still get done. Capitalism.

With human labor more expensive overall in Benign Capitalism than in Hostile Captialism, automation will become even more highly sought. Automation itself becomes more valuable.

Consider an hour of the cheapest human labor costing $9, in Hostile Capitalism. Automating that labor to reduce the cost to $1 per hour is a saving of $8 per hour -- at the cost of the human worker who is now in major financial trouble.

Imagine in Benign Capitalism that same hour of human labor now costs $15, because nobody wants to do it too cheaply, and nobody NEEDS to do it that cheaply in order to feed their kids. Automating the same task in the same way to cost $1 per hour is now a saving of $14h -- still at the cost of the human worker, but who faces no major financial trouble.

The comparison shows that while human labor is a now more valuable commodity in Benign Capitalism than Hostile Capitalism, automation is now more valuable as well. Therefore, more automation is required for businesses to maintain profits, and human labor would be most efficiently spent automating labor. Regardless of what happens to the JOB market (in terms of the ratio of human-jobs vs automated-jobs insofar as distinct "jobs" still exist), the LABOR market improves since work is being done for less expense.

In a society in which resources are allocated to enable a minimum standard of living for all members, any member who wants to work for resources, that human can choose to do so in any manner available as before. The complete freedom to work offered by Benign Capitalism ensures that humans who choose to work will be in a position to do work of interest to them -- most so than in Hostile Capitalism, whereby some humans are force to accept the first work opportunity to present itself, regardless of interest level. This is fundamental to the human need of "self-actualisation" as defined right at the peak of the Maslow hierarchy.

When you have possible entrepreneurs in the billions, you have innovation on a grander scale than anything before in civilisation. The result of innovation is invariably greater resource abundance, and greater resource variety.

Anecdotal evidence can certainly be provided for the assumer claiming that they, as an individual, would not work if given the choice. There may be other examples of others who publicly claim that they'd give up all work if doing so didn't diminish their lifestyle. I've felt like that a few times before, when doing work that was pointless and without meaning. But I don't feel that way now that my work contributes to my vision of a better world for humans to live in. The will to give up on work is a temporary feeling; it's not a "type of human".

Can the assumption be disproven then?

Yes, anecdotal evidence at the individual level also applies equally to counter the assumption. Look at any successful entrepreneur. Elon Musk has enough money to live a lavish lifestyle for the rest of his days, yet he busts his ass working for his several companies. Some humans just want to do their work. Some just want something helpful to do. These anecdotes describe behaviours measurable over time, not just feelings over time.

But empirical evidence, of course, is the basis of all good judgement.

Do we have any to validate or invalidate the assumption that humans only work if they need to? Or to show the proportions of humans who will seek out work versus those who would prefer to live off the productivity of others?

Not yet. Universal Basic Income trials are being explored at a national scale in various ways in Europe, notably the work being done in the Netherlands (see citation 8 at the end). Canada and India are investigating and planning their own trials. Even the technology community of California's "Silicon Valley" is getting involved. Efficacy data is near, but not yet here. The knowledge is still being manufactured.

In the mean time we have a hypothesis: basic income will significantly improve human living experience. Such experiments will yield large scale data to empirically show the economic and sociological effects of basic income, whatever they are. The data would then be used to evaluate the adoption and adaptation of the Basic Income model by other wealthy nations. Like the USA, where the economy can easily support it and the only question remaining is: "Should we?"

Until then, assumption 5 remains unanswered.

Exponential automation is a process that's slow to start and quick to end. But that end only means the automation of all existing work. New work can be created from any idea -- and when work like viability tests, polling, and market research are automated, entrepreneurship will eventually be a matter of ideation -- an intrinsically human knowledge task.

During the process of automating all work, human labor will shift first out of the realm of necessary manual labour (the OPTION of human manual labor will always exist), continuing the existing trend of human knowledge work uptake. In 1920 the ration of manual laborers to knowledge workers was 2:1. By 1955 the ratio was 1:1. And in 1980, the ratio was 1:2. [Citation 9, 10]

That transitional period was a major milestone in the human labor market, and the exponential growth of that ratio has been in effect ever since. The same pattern is being observed with automation. Note in the below graph published by technologyreview.com in 2013, which shows in 2000 the differential spike between US domestic productivity and "job growth". Note also the trend of separation ever since.

From the above data, we see two significant trends:

1. US automation is increasing
   
2. US job growth has stopped increasing and is leveling out
   

What if these two trends continue? Automation and job growth began to part ways 40 years ago: that's quite the efficacy test. We know we will still need a way to allocate resources, and that working for them isn't viable. We also know that fighting automation is impossible. Benign Capitalism is financially viable and resolves the most pressing issue by decoupling resource allocation from human labor. And it does so without compromising capitalism or the nation's economy. (Yes, I'm clearly trying to sell you this idea. You should buy it, while you still have some disposable income to buy things with.)

Humans will do less work, as technology does more. An increasing portion of the work done by humans will be new types of work that become viable as a result of technology (i.e. the greater resource variety produced by advances in automation). Eventually, the work done by humans will be predominantly innovation: new work, invented to produce resources more efficiently, or to produce new resources that didn't previously exist.

You'll work if you want. And your original ideas will have more value than ever before, thanks to automation.

I find this is a difficult thing to hear. It's certainly too difficult for me to think.

The purpose of human life is to experience joy. Not to pursue joy, and not to create it. Specifically to experience it. Pursuit and creation of joy are definitely part of the means. But the experience of joy is the end goal.

To deny that fact is a hypocrisy. Here's a breakdown of why:

1. All human labor has been driven by the fulfillment of a need, the avoidance of a threat, or the pursuit of joy, or a combination of those 3 reason types.
2. Every human need ever met, and every threat avoided, was done with the intention to prolong life.
3. Every human life ever to prolong itself did so in order to enable subsequent experiences of joy.

From those 3 points we can deduce that every human action is traceable, directly or indirectly, to the pursuit of joy as the end goal.

Consider as many examples as you want. You'll find the logic always holds up.

(By all means cite your clever personal or hypothetical anecdote contrary to these points if you'd like to try to disprove these claims! If you believe the prime directive of human life is NOT to experience joy, it would be valuable to us both to understand the basis of your belief. It would be interesting to know if any of those claims were wrong.)

Regardless of our beliefs, the fact remains that once all work is automated there will be nothing left to humanity BUT the pursuit of joy.

So we'd better make sure our descendants can handle it.

Thanks for learning!
Michael

Not done with this topic? Good, because automation is far from done with you. Check out this fantastic, detailed resource from The Atlantic, A World Without Work

And this punchy conversational resource by the genius Eliezer Yudkowsky, who reminds us that labour isn't a finite lump; the scope of possible labour literally matches the scope of the aggregated human imagination.

Or broaden your world view by exploring the citations and data that contributed to this article, upon which this proof of concept for Benign Captialism was based. Inspect the merchandise, so to speak. I'm sure you'll find it all in order.

Citations

CITATION 1: Cost of living calculated for the United states, specified by CareerTrends.com http://cost-of-living.careertrends.com/l/615/The-United-States
CITATION 2: 2015 Population of USA, specified by CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
CITATION 3: 2014 USA Populace under 18, specified by US census data: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/
CITATION 4: US GDP, specified by WorldBank.org http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD
CITATION 5: Why GDP is the most valid metric for measuring the size of a nation's economy, specified by Investopedia.com: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/199.asp
CITATION 6: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
CITATION 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
CITATION 8: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/netherlands-utrecht-universal-basic-income-experiment/487883/
CITATION 9: http://www.nickols.us/shift_to_KW.htm
CITATION 10: http://forschungsnetzwerk.at/downloadpub/knowledge_workers_the_biggest_challenge.pdf

Bonus link!

A data driven look at the history of automation from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-created-more-jobs-than-destroyed-140-years-data-census

This post is to thank Concept Frontier readers for coming to my website and learning what I have to offer. Here are 30 ideas, for free, for fun, for profit -- basically for you to use however you want.

Earlier today I read a piece by Yann Girard who said "Ideas are the currency of the 21st century." I completely disagree. Ideas are no more valuable than seeds: you only have something to profit from once you've grown it big enough to give you back a resource like timber or food. To me, ideas are just brain seeds.

And since, like Bill Bailey, I have a dandelion mind, I like to throw a bunch of them into the atmosphere.

Plant some of these. See what you get. They're 100% free of obligation, and some of them might even be original!

What do I get out of it? Cognitive exercise.

What do you get out of it? Free ideation, and 30 chances to create something cool.

OK, I noticed the last one was way too broad, to the point of YOU having to some of the ideation! Time to stop, have a cup of tea, and a walk.

Still, 30 ideas in 30 minutes is not bad! I had planned to try and do 100 in an hour, but I had to stop at half time due to a feeling of cognitive fatigue.

If you love the concept but none of this stuff appeals or is relevant to you, all is not lost. Besides waiting for me to do another public ideation payload like this one (for my neural exercise and your amusement) your other option is to go bespoke.

That is to say you can hit me up over on Fiverr.com any time. You can answer my meticulously designed set of questions, and purchase your own bespoke idea from the vending machine of my brain.

Any ideas you purchase will belong 100% to you (insofar as an idea can be "owned" -- but I certainly won't use it, recycle it, or even tell it to anyone who isn't you).

I'll even run due diligence and check to see if anything like it exists in the market. Because originality has intrinsic value and so do good manners.

Thanks for learning!
Michael

You know that the time you spend alive is your most valuable resource. But sometimes you put off important tasks and screw around doing more interesting stuff even though you know you shouldn't. 

If that presumption is untrue, close this page. You're not going to benefit from this. 

But if you can relate? You're about to understand yourself a little better.

This article gives you a means for controlling your behaviour and prioritising tasks, by turning your emotions into numerical data you'll use to make logical decisions.

Let's start by acquiring the theoretical model. 

Watch this smashing Concept Frontier InfoPod video. You'll learn how distraction works as a behaviour. That is, how your brain mishandles Interest and Importance so badly that you get distracted from important tasks. 

This model explains the principle behind all Last Minute Work ever conducted by frantic human beings since our species first faced the need to work. 

​Thanks for learning indeed! 

Now scoot down for the practical lesson. 

​This is how to turn emotions into numerical data. Pretty snazzy stuff. 

You'll also find it very easy to do and unbelievably effective. 

Note that this is self-reported data, not empirical. And that's absolutely fine, since popping your living skull into an fMRI scanner is not a practical way to decide whether you should keep binge-watching The Walking Dead or tackle your overdue assignment.

It works by giving your logic-loving brain the actual numerical measurements it needs to make data-driven decisions.

Without them, logic is not going to be your primary decision-making force when determining behaviour; your brain would simply use the "default mode" of relying solely on your on-the-fly interpretation of your feelings to determine the priority order of your tasks. 

And if you've ever started and completed a huge assignment the night before it was due, then you know just how ugly that can get. 

Strong coffee isn't enough. You need a psychological edge.

This is it. 

Grab a pen and paper and let's chart your brain's contents.

1. Specify your tasks
Right after you're done here, there's a bunch of stuff you feel compelled to do.
In this article I'll use two example tasks: writing an article OR watch a film.
For your copy, pick any two (or more) task activities of your own. They can be in the same quadrant or different ones. Just make sure you choose tasks you can clearly specify like "work on my thesis" or "play Assassin's Creed". The more specific you position them, the more specific your results will be.

2. Draw a grid
3x3 like this:

3. Rate the Importance and Interest of the first task on a 1-10 scale
In your grid, rate on a scale of 1 to 10 the Importance and Interest of each task.

Start with the Important task, the work. Maybe it's dreadfully boring so interest is low, let’s say 2.

But it’s quite Important you get paid for it (or don't get your head kicked in by your teacher/lecturer/employer), so importance is a 9. 

3. Rate the Importance and Interest of other tasks on a 1-10 scale
In this example watching a film is pretty interesting, let's say 8. But it's not really important. 1 out of 10 there. Do this for all the tasks you want to compare.

It's vital you are honest with yourself about the level of interest and importance for each task.

Now you have data. Simple, self-reported data, but data nonetheless.

That was easy, and you could've thought it up yourself! But you didn't. (You're getting it for even less cognitive effort — nice!)

Now you need to use your data table to get a result. In this case, the result will be a priority decision for your tasks.

4. Evaluate your data
In this next part there's an element of trial and error to find what works best for you. And a bit of creativity needed on your part to get it perfect.

But for now we'll use a "default scoring" of simple row addition as a starting point. Don't worry! The decisions you get this way are still going to make your decisions a hell of a lot more logical than they were before you fed your brain's starving logic appetite with delicious raw numbers.

Scoring can be as complicated as you like. This one, offered as a default, just has you add the value from the Interest and Importance columns to give the priority score for that task.

In this case, the work has a score of 11, but watching the film only has a score of 9. The default scoring rule is that the activity with the higher score is the one you do first. Logical, right?

What about complexity?

Are you evaluating big, time-consuming tasks? You can evaluate the same tasks again in a few hours, days, once you've completed them in full or in part. You'll see if and how the Interest and Importance levels change for each task.

If you're someone who values consistency for consistency's sake, apart from being the type of person to absolutely crucify people whenever they change their mind, you may find there's absolute consistency in your Interest and Importance levels of every task.

Interest and importance are supposed to change. Just try and produce data based on how you honestly feel in the moment, and embrace the inherent fluidity of your adaptive human feelings.

The more data you produce (even just as an exercise when you don't need help making a decision), the more insight you will gain into your Interest habits and Importance evaluations. If you record the date and time of each assessment, you will even be able to identify your own behavioural patterns over time. Extremely cool if you're into quantifying yourself!

Are you procrastinating on something important? If you are, give this system a try! Experience turning your feelings on your dreaded Quadrant 3 task (and whatever Quadrant 2 task you're using to indulge your interest!) into a data-driven decision.

Bonus Concept:
In the course of developing this model, producing the video, article, and the system I experienced a delay of FOUR EARTH MONTHS due to distraction.
Making this article and the associated video were Quadrant 1 tasks: Both VERY Important to me, and Interesting to me.
But the distraction I experienced was another Quadrant 1 task with high importance and high interest! It was a project for a client. So even though the importance and interest of producing this content were super high, the external project took precedence because the reliance of my client meant I ranked it slightly higher on the importance scale over that four month period.
This stands as an example of two tasks both in Quadrant 1 (the BEST QUADRANT that is, with high IMPORTANCE and high INTEREST) being evaluated in this very system described above. Meta!
The data for these projects were:
Client project: Imp:10, Int:9
Concept Frontier project: Imp: 9, Int:9

Thanks for learning!

Now go make some excellent decisions, and remember to spend as much time as you can in Quadrant 1.

Michael

In general, one should try not to fear change. Make sure you that you have specific reasons for your fear, if you do. Failing that, the following is a description of the behaviour you might lapse into.

Ridicule is the first recourse of those afraid of change. Ridicule of a person (a change agent) or an idea (an act of change) serves two simultaneous functions when employed:

1. It tries to shame the makers of change in an attempt to use social pressure to push others back into the comfort zone of conformity by threatening their reputation should they persist.
   
2. It tests for support while in use: "Who is with me on this?" is the implicit question in ridicule. This kind of polarising behaviour is characteristic of the "Us vs Them" pathology. This allows the changeophobe (and the change agent) to gauge the severity of the given threat.
   

Ridicule is also the changeophobe's LAST weapon, because when their attempts at pressuring others fail and they are forced to abandon their conflict, it  allows them to bow out without repercussions:

"It was just a joke,"

they will claim, as they scuttle back beneath their rock to hide from their scary new world.

Change something and you might see changeophobe tactics first-hand.

Our Concept Frontier InfoPod series on YouTube has been growing slowly, organically, and wonderfully since I started it 4 months ago. I am very, very pleased with the response (and the usage data!) so far. People are watching the videos all the way through to get the whole message. From this behaviour I can deduce that my lovely viewers are finding them genuinely insightful (or are otherwise highly compelled to see the whole thing). 

Although my knowledge and skill at promoting my content is currently limited, I obviously want to reach more people.

The moment I hit the success milestone whereby I routinely get flamed in the comments section of my YouTube videos is one that will warm my heart. 

But let's talk for a minute about what it's all about. 

These InfoPod videos are an absolutely ideal way to connect two things that are very important to me: Best-practice usage models for the human brain, and young audiences who (rightly) expect their information consumption to be easily assimilable. That pretty much means sound, moving pictures, and the Internet. 

It is vital for humanity's continued development that current and upcoming generations of young people are able to get information that helps them without having to hunt it down in the same manner our distant ancestors sought food.

When such knowledge is available to everyone, for free, where the majority of people go to consume content, the result is precisely what I want: the majority of people being informed and a minority in ignorance; rather than the other way around. From there it's a small shift forward to all people being informed and nobody left in ignorance.

And that is my mission. 

It's why I made the Concept Frontier InfoPod. There's absolutely no reason at all for any kid to be denied easy access to an understanding of behavioural matters. They should be able to add it to their regular consumption channels and have the chance to nab an insight or two between Minecraft videos. 

With that in mind, now it's time to UP THE ANTE! I need YOU to sponsor my BRAND NEW Patreon to help me make LOADS MORE VIDEOS and make them WAY MORE OFTEN. Click here for my Patreon! 

This is my life's work. It feels good to say it. This is the work I should be doing.

And I will do it no matter what. But with financial backing from people like you, people who believe in my mission, I'll be able to give it more than just 5 hours per week. It needs to be my full time job. 

Help me achieve that. Make Concept Frontier content creation my primary function. It's as simple as sponsoring my Patreon project for a dollar per video. You'll be doing me the biggest favour of my life, and that's a fact. 

If you share my vision to make a measurable and positive difference to the way human beings like you and I use information, please help me right now. Just go to my Patreon here, pick the pack you like most, and become an Information Pioneer today. You'll get all sorts of rewards, even if you can only pledge $1 per video. 

It's a lot of fun, and totally worth it! 

www.patreon.com/ConceptFrontier

Thanks for helping! 
Michael ​​

'Majority overlap' is the name for the set of experience attributes that exist for a majority of users. This phenomenon exists at the heart of UX design. 

Majority overlap works like this:

Three people need to use a train service. 

Person 1 needs to go to work at the same time every day. He wants to stop driving his poison-machine of a car, and see if catching the train gets him there just as fast with less carbon emissions. 

Person 2 needs to get to town for a coffee date one time. Depending how the date turns out, there may be subsequent dates and subsequent train rides. 

Person 3 is going on a multi-day train tour exploring the railway history of the country. 

Each person has a list of experience attributes that could look like this: 

The experience attributes of person 1: 
Trip recurrence: determined by all requirements being met
Arrival time: reliable 
Duration: short 
Stress level: lower than driving 
Carbon emissions: lower than driving 
Safety: adequate

The experience attributes of person 2: 
Trip recurrence: determined entirely by external factors 
Arrival time: reliable 
Safety: adequate

The experience attributes of person 3: 
Recurrence determined by user enjoyment requirement AND external factors (budget)
Arrival time irrelevant 
Duration: long
Enjoyment: high
Safety: adequate 

Majority overlap in this example is the list of experience attributes shared by 2 or more (in this case 66% or more) of users. In this case only these factors comprise the majoriy overlap of experience attributes: 

Safety: adequate (relevant to 100% of users) 
Arrival time: reliable (relevant to 66% of users) 
Trip recurrence: determined by UX (relevant to 66% of users) 

Majority overlap is what a UX designer needs to spend most (not all) of their effort to optimise, because they are demonstrably the most important aspects of the general user experience. Getting things right beyond those core aspects has a lower ROI, and is can be more difficult due to potentially conflicting requirements between subsets of users -- consider the conflict between users' experiences in our example: "Duration: short" and and "Duration: long" are each viewed as favourable by Person 1 and Person 3 respectively. User preference conflicts = complexity (i.e. making the experience configurable by the user), and there's a line must to be drawn between investment in developing that complexity vs the cost of lost usership resulting from that complexity's absence. 

Our example looks at 3 users. When your user base is millions of individuals, you might define "majority" more like 99.9999% than 66%. The larger your defined 'majority'  the smaller your 'majority overlap' of experience attributes. 

It's easy to make assumptions about what aspects of the experience comprise the 'majority overlap' when embarking on a project. Sometimes that's perfectly adequate. 

But the most effective means is to analyse usage data and aggregate user feedback whenever it's available. This allows you to determine the majority overlap in empirical terms, and focus effort where it will benefit the majority of your users. 

Thanks for learning! 
Michael 

​This phenomenon arose under some pretty specific circumstances. It took me by surpise, but it's not an isolated incident! I have experienced similar situations before that I (regrettably) failed to examine in this detail. 

But I caught this one. Like a Pokémon. Here's how it went down.

​I currently have a project in which I'm making an intranet for a company. 

Part of this includes the task of creating 170 pages for each of the major products the company sells. These pages have information about products that will help staff sell, ship, and promote them. 

In the HTML template I created for all these pages is an iframe that points to the product record on the public website in order to "single source" additional information and display it on the intranet along with the non-public content. 
I have to manually set up each page, which takes a minute, and manually load the iframe links which will take slightly less. 

The approach I'm taking is to create all the pages and apply the HTML template, then go through them a second time to add the links. The idea is that fewer hand movements per page equates to quicker repetition, and improved efficiency (though I might be wrong, as I haven't tested both methods yet). 
​
Project Manager advised me that the Marketing Manager is overhauling the public website, so that might kill my iframes. So it might be best not to put them in. 

I needed to find out if that's the case, so I requested that information from the Marketing Manager. 
While I waited for my reply, I continued on as I was, aware that I might need to go back in and take out the iframe part of the template for each page. The shroud of possible re-work loomed menacingly. 

Here's when I encountered the anomalous behaviour. 

I saw the email from the Marketing Manager in my inbox containing the information I need. Specifically it would have the decision "use iframes" or "don't use iframes". 

This was when the strange thing happened. 

I didn't want to open the email yet. 

I fully realised that by not looking at it, there was a 50% probability of continuing to use the wrong HTML template. That I could save myself time and minimise re-work simply by checking it and applying the decision in my subsequent actions. Needless to say, it felt bizarre and wrong that I shouldn't want that! 

I asked myself why I didn't want to learn the information yet. 

The answer surprised me: 

I wanted less cognitive load! 

I wanted to get through all the product pages with the HTML template I was using and then go through them all again as a set, as I had PLANNED. I wanted to do that regardless of how many changes I had to make in the template. 

I didn't want to halve my set of 170 into two sets of "these have the right HTML template, and these have the wrong HTML template" because I was AFRAID that even that slight additional complexity in my workflow might cause me to make a mistake and apply INCONSISTENCY in the site. 

To trace these matters back to familiar models, let's look at the words I've highlighted above: 

• PLANNED: I had a plan I knew I could handle, and I wanted to stick to it. The chance existed that the new information might derail my plan and force me to make a new one. I was resistant to that. But why? 
• AFRAID: It is my observation (call it a hypothesis) that all human motivations can be traced in essence to either a fear or a desire. In this case, a fear was the the motivator; fear of making a mistake. 
• INCONSISTENCY: As Dr Robert Cialdini points out in his splendid book Influence: The Power of Persuasion, the "consistency principle" of psychology was at work here. My need for consistency (which I have habitually tried to rid myself of ever since being introduced to the concept by Cialdini's book!) crept up on me. It overrode what should have been a fiscally responsible decision. The right decision would have been to read the Marketing Manager's email immediately to learn her decision, and then take the most efficient course of action on the assumption that my brain and tools could handle any degree of work complexity. But I didn't! I postponed putting the information into my noggin because the urge to be consistent with what I was doing was stronger than the urge to do less work. Mental!

On closer examination, that fear of inconsistency in my work was derived from my fear of being evaluated poorly by my client, which is a form of the fear of reaction (explained in this YouTube video). I'm normally not very susceptible to it because I know how to spot it. But in this case it was tied to my professional reputation, upon which my livelihood partially depends, and as a result it got me anyway! 

Have you ever seen a message or email that you've been waiting for that you know you need, and chosen not to consume the information right away? 

If you have, ask yourself why. Be honest, and perhaps a little vulnerable, when you answer it. 

You might surprise yourself. 

Author's note: The very moment I identified the anomaly in my information consumption, I downed tools to write about the phenomenon. Producing this article has helped me understand my behaviour. At the time of writing I still haven't read the email. But I will do that now, and make a better decision than I was about to. 
​
Thanks for learning!
Michael

I had this epiphany recently that changed my life. 

Because I enjoy change, and I enjoy life, I’ll share it here with my lovely audience of information experts. 

What variance am I talking about? 

The variables are many. The ones I care chiefly about are the ones that are the product of their unique sequence of experiences: 

Identity, Values, Beliefs, Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviour. 

Consider the nearest person to you in space as you read this. That person’s Identity is wildly different from your own. Their values too. Different beliefs, different thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Some probably overlap that you can identify. There might be quite a few if it’s a close family member. You might not have enough information to go on if it’s a stranger. But nevertheless, their profile is distinctly and markedly different from yours even if it’s your twin sibling that you’ve grown up with. 

Now, as you imagine, add a third person. Consider any similarities in identity, values, beliefs, thoughts, and behaviours between you and them, between person 3 and person 2. Now see if you can identify any similarities between all 3 of you. 

Chances are there’s a lot of “I don’t knows” in there. You can’t read minds. You can observe some visual cues that may or may not indicate attributes of identity. You can perhaps see some behaviours. But mostly you can’t evaluate jack. 

That’s only 3 people. 

Now try doing it with 7,200,000,000 people. 

I reckon you can’t. Because there is simply too much data for a single human brain to parse. Not to mention the fact that almost all of it is inaccessible. Or that a critical mass of the first 10,000 identities you had analysed would have changed dramatically before you even began on the next 10,000. 

But, like the pattern recognition machines we are, we try anyway. We do this by letting our imaginations take over and apply sweeping, oversimplified brush strokes like “Everyone likes cake!” or “Nobody likes her!”. And then we justify those romping absurdities with an “I’ll keep this opinion until I gain new data” attitude. 

The problem with that approach is that those opinions sit, solidify, and often (not always) become entrenched beliefs that we then set out to defend! 

I’ve been doing it my whole life. 

Here’s an example of it that’s way too close to home: I almost wrote the line above as “We all have been doing this our whole lives.” As I just described I can’t possibly know that for certain. 

It’s a grim reality to face the fact that no human can understand all humans. 

We don’t understand our world. We don’t understand our own species. We don’t truly understand each other. We barely even understand ourselves! 

We are each a polyp, clinging tightly to the minerals closest to us, trying to make sense of the entire reef based purely on what our puny cilia can feel. 

It’s preposterous that we should even use the words like “everyone” or “nobody” at all. Yet, in our unfathomable ignorance, many of us do just that. 

So what’s the way out? The way forward? The way to understanding? 

In my experience, it’s simply... experience! The more we have, the more information we gain, the better we understand the bigger picture. 

We need to face that no one of us will ever know or understand humanity on the scale of billions. Omniscience is beyond us for now. 

But what we can do is dedicate some effort to understanding those who are not like us whenever your and their spheres of experience overlap. To listen to what others have to say. 

To quote a valuable belief shared by Ramit Sethi in an interview he did for Medium.com 

Even if all you learn is a new way that humans can differ, that’s valuable. And that behaviour moves us all forward. 

Good luck out there, fellow polyp. May your grip on the reef ever broaden. 

Thanks for learning! 
Michael 

Just for fun, h​ere’s a breakdown of this article’s content in a AI-readable format.  :)