PODCAST · technology
Oddly Influenced
by Brian Marick
A podcast about how people have applied ideas from outside software to software.
Episodes
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E52: Emotions as concepts
An elaboration on episode 49's description of the brain as a prediction engine, focusing on a theory of what emotions are, how they're learned, and how emotional experiences are constructed. Emotions like anger and fear turn out to be not that different from concepts like money or bicycle, except...
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E51: Constructed memories (a nugget)
Memories appear to be constructed by plugging together stored templates. Do concepts operate the same way? Sources Suzi Travis, "False Memories are Exactly What You Need", 2024. Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and...
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E50: the preferred level of abstraction (a nugget)
We see a creature near us, and we describe it as a dog. Why that and not "mammal" or "animal"? And if that dog's a Springer Spaniel, and we know it's a Springer Spaniel, why do we nevertheless call it a "dog"? In an apparent digression, I discuss the idea in cognitive science of a "basic level of...
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E49: Metaphors and the predictive brain
It's fairly pointless to analyze metaphors in isolation. They're used in a cumulative way as part of real or imagined conversations. That meshes with a newish way of understanding the brain: as largely a prediction engine. If that's true, what would it mean for metaphorical names in code? Sources…
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E48: Multiple metaphors
When we name a class name `Invoice`, are we communicating or thinking metaphorically? I used to think we were; now I think we aren't. This episode explains one reason: ordinary conversation frequently uses multiple metaphors when talking about some concept. Sometimes we even mix inconsistent or...
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E47: Oops! The Winston W. Royce Story
In 1970, Winston W. Royce published a paper “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems.” Later authors cited it as the justification for what had come to be called the "waterfall process." Yet Royce had quite specifically described that process as one that is "simplistic" and "invites...
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E46: How do metaphors work?
Conceptual metaphor is a theory in cognitive science that claims understanding and problem-solving often (but not always) happen via systems of metaphor. I present the case for it, and also expand on the theory in the light of previous episodes on ecological and embodied cognition. This episode…
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E45: The offloaded brain, part 5: I propose a software design style
In this episode, I ask the question: what would a software design style inspired by ecological and embodied cognition be like? I sketch some tentative ideas. I plan to explore this further at nh.oddly-influenced.dev, a blog that will document an app I'm beginning to write. In my implementation, I...
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E44: The offloaded brain, part 4: an interview with David Chapman
In the '80s, David Chapman and Phil Agre were doing work within AI that was very compatible with the ecological and embodied cognition approach I've been describing. They produced a program, Pengi, that played a video game well enough (given the technology of the time) even though it had nothing...
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E43: The offloaded brain, part 3: dynamical systems
Scientists studying ecological and embodied cognition try to use algorithms as little as they can. Instead, they favor dynamical systems, typically represented as a set of equations that share variables in a way that is somewhat looplike: component A changes, which changes component B, which...
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E42: The offloaded brain, part 2: applications
Suppose you believed that the ecological/embodied cognitive scientists of last episode had a better grasp on cognition than does our habitual position that the brain is a computer, passively perceiving the environment, then directing the body to perform steps in calculated plans. If so, technical...
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E41: The offloaded brain, part 1: behavior
Embodied or Ecological Cognition is an offshoot of cognitive science that rejects or minimizes one of its axioms: that the computer is a good analogy for the brain. That is, that the brain receives inputs from the senses; computes with that input as well as with goals, plans, and stored...
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EXCERPT: Concepts without categories
This excerpt from episode 40 contains material independent of that episode's topic (collaborative circles) that might be of interest to people who don't care about collaborative circles. It mostly discusses a claim, due to Andy Clark, that words are not labels for concepts. Rather, words come…
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EXCERPT: Christopher Alexander’s forces
Software design patterns were derived from the work of architect Christopher Alexander, specifically his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. This excerpt (from episode 39) addresses a problem: most software people don't know one of Alexander's most important ideas, that of...
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E40: Roles in collaborative circles, part 2: creative roles
The last in the series on collaborative circles. The creative roles in a collaborative circle, discussed with reference to both Christopher Alexander's forces and ideas from ecological and embodied cognition. Special emphasis on collaborative pairs. Sources Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative...
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E39: Roles in collaborative circles, part 1
Farrell describes a number of distinct roles important to the development of a collaborative circle. This episode is devoted to the roles important in the early stages, when the circle is primarily about finding out what it is they actually dislike about the status quo. In order to make the…
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E38: The trajectory of a collaborative circle
Collaborative circles don't have a smooth trajectory toward creative breakthrough. I describe the more common trajectory. I also do a little speculation on how a circle's "shared vision" consists of goals, habits, and "anti-trigger words." I also suggest that common notions of trust or...
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E37: Resilience engineering with Lorin Hochstein
An interview with Lorin Hochstein, resilience engineer and author. Our discussion was about how to handle a complex system that falls down hard and – especially – how to then prepare for the next incident. The discussion is anchored by David D. Woods' 2018 paper, “The Theory of Graceful...
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E36: BONUS: One circle-style history of Context-Driven Testing
I was a core member of what Farrell would call a collaborative circle: the four people who codified Context-Driven Testing. That makes me think I can supplement Farrell's account with what it feels like to be inside a circle. I try to be "actionable", not just some guy writing a memoir. My topics...
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BONUS: a circle-centric reading of software development through the 1990s, plus screech owls
Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) describes how groups of people follow a trajectory from vague dislike of the status quo, to a sharpened criticism of it, to a shared vision (and supporting techniques) intended to displace it. The development...
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E34: /Collaborative Circles/, part 1: a teaser
Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) is about how groups of people ("circles") begin with discomfort about the status quo and, after collaboration and discussion, make creative breakthroughs. It's based on six case studies. Four are circles of...
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E33: Interview: Jessica Kerr on /Games: Agency as Art/
Jessica Kerr (known to computers everywhere as @jessitron) is a software developer, speaker, and symmathecist. (A symmathesy is a learning system composed of learning parts. To her, each software team is a symmathesy composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all of their…
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E32: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 3: expertise, panopticism, and the Big Visible Chart
The final episode of "the Foucault trilogy". Ways of evaluating humans that became common during the ~1750-1850 period. Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor. Self-improvement via exhibitionism. Final reflections on Foucault. Sources Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison,...
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E31: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 2: the factory
An intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do* with that theory in the sense of "applying it to software". So it doesn't really fit with the podcast theme. But his is a...
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E30: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, and voluntary panopticism, part 1
Part 1 is a synopsis of Foucault's claim that the societal attitude toward punishment of criminals changed radically over a period of about 80 years, starting in the mid-1700s: from punishment as vengeance, to punishment as persuading the minds of many, to punishment as correcting the personality...
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E29: Interview: Trond Hjorteland on a radical approach to organizational transformation
Open Systems Theory (OST) is an approach to organizational transformation that dates back to the late 1940s. It's been applied a fair amount, but hasn't gotten much mindshare in the software world. It has similarities to Agile, but leans into self-organization in a much more thoroughgoing way.…
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E28: /Governing the Commons/, part 4: creating a successful commons
I describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a similar improvement. As with earlier episodes, I'm leaning on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of...
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E27: /Governing the Commons/, part 3: Man, 63, seeks software teams, any age. Object: matchmaking
A short episode that encourages members of software teams to give Elinor Ostrom's ideas a try, in two ways: 1. I'm arranging for Elinor Ostrom's intellectual heirs to provide support. 2. Your situation is not worse than those of Sri Lankan farmers in the Gal Oya irrigation system. A commons-style...
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E26: /Governing the Commons/, part 2: the key mechanisms
Ostrom's core principles for the design of successful commons: how to monitor compliance with rules, how to punish non-compliance, how to resolve disputes, and how to participate in making rules. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, 1990 Erik...
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/Governing the Commons/, part 1: setting the scene
This is the first of two or three episodes that draw on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik Nordman’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action. What I hope is that those...
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BONUS: Seeing like a personality survey
My goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than people on the left.” TL;DR: For practical purposes, it doesn't mean anything. You might guess, from the previous episode, that it's…
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Personality and destiny
It’s hard to predict how personality traits will affect behavior in new situations. We don’t have a good grasp of the difference between a “new situation” and “a variant of an old situation.” Small differences in the situation (like recent good luck) can make a big difference in how traits like...
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This is not an episode (a diversion into what makes explanations good)
The key message begins with the observation that categories and concepts have central examples and fuzzy boundaries. The idea that categories are usefully defined by boolean-valued necessary and sufficient conditions is outdated. The stock example is the question: "Is the pope a bachelor?" The...
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Legitimate peripheral participation: the book and the idea
Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 1991. Note: I'd say this is the least readable of the books I've covered so far, especially if you're allergic to jargon-heavy academic social science. On the plus side, it's only 123 pages (excluding…
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/Talking About Machines/: copier repair technicians and story-telling
Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, 1996 Credits Image of a person using a copier via Mr. Domingo.
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/Seeing Like a State/, part 3: the users, the clients
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998. XKCD, Always try to get data good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities…
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/Seeing Like a State/, part two: recognizing your High Modernist eidolon
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998. Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of…
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E17: James C. Scott’s /Seeing Like a State/, part one
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998. The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.dev Credits Satellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Interview: Glenn Vanderburg on engineering
Mentioned One of Glenn's talks on engineering. The first part of Hillel Wayne's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969 Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer...
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Interview: Mark Seemann on /Blindsight/ and /Thinking, Fast and Slow/
Mark Seemann blog twitter Code That Fits in Your Head, 2021 The books Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006. Goodreads description. Or: free at the author's site. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011 Also mentioned Read Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, 2006 Felienne...
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BONUS: Lord, preserve us from totalizing systems
DDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011 David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, 2021 Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows' Aimi Hussein and Racheal...
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David Graeber’s three kinds of economies
David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011 People mentioned Einar W. Høst
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David Graeber, gift economies, and open source projects
David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011 Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000 Credits Picture of a Kula ring gift item, Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Analogies in and around /Image and Logic/
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997 The 1968 Software Engineering Conference An objection to the trading zone Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, 2002. Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere",...
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Mini-episode: What does Galison mean by “tradition”?
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997 Wikipedia on academic genealogy @made_in_cosmos had a tweet about tradition that I mentioned Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth, 1998 Context-driven...
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Mini-episode: Galison doubts Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolutions
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962 Steven Law, "Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception?", 2018. (Also has a picture of the Necker cube, which Kuhn also uses. Come to think of…
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Galison’s /Image and Logic/, Part 2: The Trading Zone
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997 Credits Roman coin depicting the harbor at Ostia, from the title page of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, translated by Wilfred H. Schoff, 1912....
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Galison’s /Image and Logic/, Part 1: The stickiness of experimental tradition
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997 Brian Marick, An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming, unfinished Brian Marick, Lenses for the Mere Mortal: Purescript Edition, unfinished Programming languages: Clojure, ClojureScript, Elixir, Elm,...
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E7: Imre Lakatos on what persuades scientists to risk their careers
Lakatos in a nutshell Scientists join research programmes. Research programmes are characterized by a small hard core of 2-5 postulates that guide development of theories and experiments. The hard core is not questioned from within the research programme. To be progressive, a research program…
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Interview: James Shore and Boundary Objects
James Shore: website, The Art of Agile Development, AOAD book club, twitter Mentioned Susan Leigh Star, This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept, 2010 Jeff Patton: website, story mapping articles, story mapping book, twitter Gojko Adzic: website, book on impact…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
A podcast about how people have applied ideas from outside software to software.
HOSTED BY
Brian Marick
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How many episodes does Oddly Influenced have?
Oddly Influenced currently has 55 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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A podcast about how people have applied ideas from outside software to software.
How often does Oddly Influenced release new episodes?
Oddly Influenced has 55 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts Oddly Influenced?
Oddly Influenced is created and hosted by Brian Marick.
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