Charlie's notebook

Public life has been irrevocably changed by social media

Has it? "Public life" has always had to cope with yellow journalism and fear/rumor-mongering, overblown and undeserving celebrities, bullying politicians, and falsehoods and coverups. We are what we eat in print or online. What is different today is the "firehose" stream of information that bombards us day and night. How I long for the days when the tv programming would turn off at 12 midnight and you would be greeted simply with a wall of static. It is the screen addiction that is most dangerous, I think, because you have a sense that you are doing something, but you are not.

@RarelyCharlie have you ever seen the British Netflix series "Black Mirror"? That is quite the sardonic hyperbole of social media and digital technology of the future (skip the first episode - too intense!!).

However on the bright, hopeful side, it's nice for people with limited mobility to instantly connect with people of all kinds from all over the world and find common ground. This can and does miraculously happen, amid the clamor of drum-beating and soapbox oratory.

How could we convert friendships between online avatars to real person-to-person relationships? Peer support has been shown to be beneficial in a person's recovery from mental illness. Perhaps organizations like 7cups can partner in some way with meetup organizations to help find real life local peer support (see Meetups). But I'm not sure this is exactly what you were talking about, Charlie. Were you talking about finding more sophisticated ways of managing trust strictly online?

@RarelyCharlie

In 7Cups' defense it is not exactly social media. It is an emotional support platform, thatused to pride on free, anonymous text. (support chats)

I just came across a long and interesting article that was posted online as a solid block of text with no subheadings or paragraph breaks. Almost unreadable! I thought about maybe posting my own formatted version to make it easier to read, so that when I mention it in a 7 Cups forum (which I eventually did here) I could link to a more readable version.

That train of thought made me think about where to post my own formatted version of the article. Where, in general, can you publish a long article? That's easy for me, of course. I have a choice of websites, including one that's exclusive to supporting 7 Cups. But what if you don't have that choice?

The world seems to be divided on this question. Some people realize that you can go to one of any number of website providers and create a free website for yourself in under 5 minutes. (For what it's worth, my choice would be WordPress.com.) Formatting the article would have taken far longer than creating an entire new website to publish it on.

For a more complicated website, maybe with a forum or other specialized features I might use a different provider. The last time I did that, a few weeks ago, it took probably around 10 minutes and cost around 10 for a year. (They gave me a discount code, too—PM me if you'd like to use it.)

Some people, however, don't seem to realize any of this, and they behave as if Internet technology is difficult, expensive, and takes a long time to implement. One of 7 Cups' major problems, I think, has been its unwillingness to realize that Internet technology is now easy, cheap and quick.

I think we saw this problem when the feed disappeared. There seems to have been no belief that an easy, cheap and quick alternative could ever be made. And I think we saw it when Browse Listeners was tweaked to remove inactive listeners. It was announced as if it was a major breakthrough that took months to achieve, when in reality it was just a simple change in some search parameters.

In the end, I was able to find a version of the article with the formatting intact, so I didn't have to do any work after all.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

So I guess it's a trust issue ("managing trust", as you mentioned in an earlier post). How does one know who to trust with designing or managing one's website? How does one go about negotiating how to give over or share that control?

@quietCloud22 That's an interesting take on it, which I hadn't thought of.

My thinking was that 7 Cups mainly relies on commonplace website software: some static pages, a forum, live chat, members who have various roles and capabilities. Because these things are commonplace they are very cheap. Free downloads, mostly, because groups of volunteers on the Internet are constantly developing these things as "open source" projects. I've contributed to some of them.

But that's on the Internet. Internally, 7 Cups behaves as if these things are expensive and difficult. Just fixing a typo on the website is like a big project that might not succeed.

I was thinking this happens because some people just don't realize how easy, cheap and quick these commonplace things are—that the problem is a kind of ignorance.

But your suggestion that it's an issue of trust and control could be right. Maybe the people who control 7 Cups don't trust the developers they've hired? And maybe they feel that having to ask a developer to fix a typo is giving away control? And maybe the developers don't trust their employers, so they don't give away control of the website content so as to allow anyone else to fix typos?

All speculation, of course

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie Well, also, it may also be a matter of intelligent people who, having forged an auspicious life outside the realm of computer technology, don't want to be bothered with even the simplest actions on a Wordpress website. I am very close to a person who once taught at Harvard, but saves everything to his desktop because he doesn't know where to find things that he's downloaded. If you show people like this just how to right click, then you've made real progress.

@RarelyCharlie

One more thought (an analogy ) I have an automobile that I love dearly. It takes care of me; I take care of it. I know that an auto mechanic considers oil changes absurdly simple, but I don't want to know how to do it and get greasy hands - I just want someone I trust to take care of it. How would an auto mechanic go about getting my business?

OR... say, I DO know an awful lot about cars, but I don't have time to do it all, only some of it. How would an auto mechanic earn my trust to get my business?

@quietCloud22 I think it's more like...my car needs an oil change so I call a place that advertises it and they tell me an oil change is a major repair that will cost 800, maybe more depending on what they find, and my car will be off the road for at least a week.

Then I call another place and they say an oil change is routine, it costs 50 with no extras, and they'll do it while I have a complimentary coffee in their customer lounge.

What I'm wondering is: how does the first place get any business? In real life they would never get any oil change business. Automobile services seem to be unlike website services in that way.

I've read that some healthcare costs go the other way because insurers and government make arrangements that raise prices dramatically. For example, surgery can cost $1,900 in one place and more than $19,000 in another place down the street, and the expensive place stays in business! See: Keith Smith on Free Market Health Care (podcast, but scroll down for a transcript of the highlights).

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie You could start a whole other thread on healthcare - WOW! Didn't insurance have it's beginnings in the street where thugs would extort a fee for "protection"?

As regards the psychology of pricing, (for anything), it's funny. Too high (like, I'd NEVER spend over $1000.00 for an iPad Pro or an iPhone, but some people do), and either you suspect you are getting ripped off, or you are sure you are getting an indispensable item (I want a solid state not a fusion drive for my iMac, when I should just get a fusion drive with a couple good external drives for backup). OR, you just want a luxury item to parade in front of the neighbors.

@quietCloud22 Yes, healthcare is a big, contentious issue in our current election here as well as in the US (for some different reasons and also for some similar reasons).

Pricing, that's true. There's complicated psychology at work. I vaguely remember a great story about a company that made some basic household item that didn't sell very well. So they introduced a super expensive model. What happened was the super expensive model didn't sell much at all, but sales of the basic model shot up because people now perceived it as good value.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie I just read over the transcript of the Keith Smith podcast - very, VERY interesting, thanks! I didn't see in this particular interview a discussion of malpractice suits, which we in America are led to believe is the main culprit in jacked-up healthcare prices, but a search on the site for "tort reform" yielded these results.

This is a guy, Louis M. Profeta, M.D., that I follow on Link ed In. I haven't explored his website much, but I do read most of his articles that pop up from time to time in my feed. He says in his profile that he's "just an emergency physician." Most of his posts have to do with life down in the ER trenches saving lives, but here are his thoughts on healthcare reform. Some seem similar to Keith Smith's ideas. Hope these kinds of discussions take off and gain leverage in the political world.

@RarelyCharlie I think the problem is that the software behind 7cups isn't off-the-shelf; rather than splicing together a few well-tested open source components they wrote the whole thing in PHP. Which, despite its reputation among non-developers of being easy to use, is in fact almost impossible to write reliable, safe, maintainable code in. I applied for an open developer position at 7cups about a year ago; I'm rather glad I didn't get it.

@stressBear I agree that part of the problem could be that more of 7 Cups is homegrown that was really necessary (or so it appears with hindsight). But I don't believe that explains all of it.

People love to dump on PHP

Yet PHP is used on just about 80% of all websites there are, including the 60 million websites that use WordPress.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie If you have a huge community or large company behind a PHP site, it's fairly easy to keep up to date with all the bug reports and vulnerabilities -- Wikipedia, Wordpress, and Facebook each have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of programmer-hours worth of improvement and bug fixes behind them.

But PHP is not a language for beginners -- it's way too easy to leave your site open to attacks, by doing things that the language appears to encourage. And it's way too easy to create an unmaintainable mess.

One data point I have is that Amazon, where I used to work, has banned PHP, including for one-off internal web services that never get connected to the public internet.

I just wasted an astonishing amount of time chatting with the delightful but weird bot AI Dungeon 2. You can read some of my story here: A state-of-the-art chatbot?

By the end I had found out how to transform myself into an eagle. I flew to the top of a mountain from where I watched the sun set. Did I mention it's delightful but weird?

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Oh man, I gotta try this... thanks very much. :D

@frigidstars27

i told charlie this is perfect for creative writers to help them come up with new ideas ;)

@RarelyCharlie

This is interesting stuff

@RarelyCharlie Very cool! Can it be played on a Mac?

@quietCloud22 You can play it on the website or you should be able to download it and play it on your own computer. I've only tried the website, but I might try it the other way if I get the time. I can't think of any obvious reason why both ways shouldn't work on a Mac, but I'm not an expert.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Ok, maybe I should give this game another chance, because my first try did not end well. I was immediately introduced to this guy who was "eyeing me with suspicion" but who right off told me his name was "Dave". This immediately aroused MY suspicions, because if he was suspicious of me, why would he tell me his name, unless, of course, it was not his true name? So try as I would, I could not make him go away, so I shot him with my arrow that was supposed to be meant for a deer I was stalking. After I took pity on him and brought him back to life, all he would do is nod his head and smile at me. Then I got an error message from the game that it was "looping." I tried to befriend the deer, but the game wouldn't let me, so apparently I was destined to do something with "Dave", but couldn't figure out what.

So maybe I should have practiced my active listening skills on him at first instead of shooting him? Or maybe I just should have turned him into a frog.

@quietCloud22 If that ever happens to me, I will remember to try the frog idea

I think when I said it is not entirely rational that was an understatement—it is deeply random and crazy with only a thin smear of rationality.

This contrasts with early versions of the genre, which goes back forty years, apparently. Those early games were rigidly deterministic and they only understood a few words. You can still play them online, for example at zorkonline.net where I think the Adventure game is the one that can be traced back to 1977.

Charlie

@quietCloud22

interesting it wouldnt allow you to do what you wanted to do i wonder if its because of a bug or by design i dont know a lot about the programming that goes into AI tech of course a regular game will have limits maybe its more like just a computer game and not really a true AI or just a very limited AI ? it seems like if a deer exists you should be able to interact with it ...

@jennysunrise8 With an AI, the deer doesn't "exist". Imagine the AI is dreaming, and its dreams are influenced, but not completely controlled, by the things you whisper to it. At one moment it dreams of a deer, but soon it is dreaming of something else and has no memory of any deer.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

oh interesting ! i wonder then if sometimes a person could interact just fine with the deer and sometimes the deer might just poof and be gone like if each time it might be a different experience ? i think im going to try some things out today :)

@jennysunrise8 Yes, I think it might be different each time. I notice the whole thing has stopped working today because word is getting around and too many people want to play it.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

do you know if it can be downloaded and how to download it i might do that i didnt think of that if too many people are playing at the same time it could just be overwhelmed and thats causing problems

@jennysunrise8 Yes, it can be downloaded, but my computer is not powerful enough to run it, so I don't know any more. The minimal instructions are here—scroll down to see the four commands.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie @Jennysunrise

Maybe the deer was the ephemeral Cernunnos, Celtic god of the forest and wild animals, and I was distracted by "Dave" so I wouldn't shoot him with my arrow?

@RarelyCharlie That's delightfully weird.

There are a couple Google doodles that are fun, albeit without the random elusive prose of A1 Dungeon. My 2 top favorites are the Oskar Fishinger composer and today's Mexican board game, Lotería. The former invites you to create an avant garde musical composition, the latter, to race random players or your friends to first line up a pattern of cards, sort of like Bingo, only a lot more fun, and you learn to say words like "el xoloitzcuintli" to the background of lively mariachi music. Tip: you don't have to click and drag a bean onto a matching card - you just have to click on the card. ARRRRRIIIIIIIBA!

Just started reading How to talk so kids will listen & listen so kids will talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. I like it a lot, and I think I'll probably add it to my Listeners' Reading List, but I'm not sure yet.

I'm not sure partly because I don't much like the self-help format, and it was never my intention to include self-help books in the list.

But the main reason I'm not sure is because of the word must. As in:

"I got ninety-seven on my math test today."

"Ninety-seven! You must be so pleased!"

The problem is that must has two completely different meanings. It might mean:

"I require you to be very pleased."

Or it might mean:

"I conclude that you are very pleased."

The first meaning risks shutting down the conversation. Maybe the child was expecting 100 on this test, and 97 is a disappointment. Telling a child how they must feel could shut down the possibility of understanding how they really feel.

It seems to me it's important not to use the word must like this because of that risk, but that doesn't seem to have occurred to the authors of this best-selling book—at least, not in the chapters I've read so far.

Even so, I think this is a great book with lots of examples of dialogue illustrating what we at 7 Cups call active listening.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

There is actually a book called "Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity".

It's a "musth" read.

:)

@quietCloud22 Interesting!

That reminds me of the well known clinical psychologist Michael Yapko, who has also worked with elephants. Here he explains his choice of website logo: Why The Elephant?

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Do you have a book you'd recommend for a kid to read that would encourage critical thinking? I sent my 6-yr-old granddaughter the "I Am A Rebel Girl Journal" which I think is great for empowering positive self-talk and action, however, how do you teach kids how to THINK before they talk and act?

@quietCloud22 I can't think of anything specific.

My thoughts first turned to the classic How Children Learn by John Holt, but it's for parents (and grandparents too, I suppose ), and if I remember it right it probably undermines the idea that a thing like critical thinking can be taught at all in any direct way.

And then I thought of Aesop's Fables—a collection of stories about common thinking errors.

Charlie

The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.

And...

7 Cups has helped 39,061,213 people (at the time of writing) but if you try to chat to a listener there's a chance you'll just be ghosted.

What's the connection?

This goes back to the early days of 7 Cups, when in 2013 it was one of the startup companies at Y Combinator.

One of the founders of Y Combinator was Paul Graham. (He wrote a book, Hackers and Painters, that's on my Listeners' Reading List.) Recently he published an article on his blog, The Lesson to Unlearn, explaining why getting good grades and learning important and useful stuff are conflicting goals. That's where the quote at the top comes from.

And then another blogger, Benjamin Hoffman, pointed out earlier today, in Approval Extraction Advertised as Production, that the approach Paul Graham criticizes in his article is exactly the approach that Y Combinator appears to use. Y Combinator encourages startup founders to "get good grades" in various ways, to extract approval, but this is not the same as production. Companies exposed to Y Combinator tend to chase great-looking numbers but find it more difficult to be genuinely successful by making a good product.

The figure of 39,061,213 people helped is a "good grade" that distracts 7 Cups from doing anything to fix the problem of ghosting.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

I have something interesting to share. Not only is 7 Cups preoccupied with getting good grades, but they also appear to be cheating on the tests. ;)

I clicked on the first link in your post and I was really curious about some of the eye-popping numbers on that page. I wanted to see what sort of research they have to back up these extraordinary (and somewhat unbelievable) claims:

90% of people feel better after talking to listeners
97% of people view their listener positively
80% of people believe listeners can help people with mental health issues
81% of users consider 7 Cups as a helpful service
70% of people feel support provided by 7 Cups listeners is just as or more helpful than that provided by psychotherapy

I did some digging into the four research papers that are listed on 7 Cups... and it's hard for me to express how badly distorted some of these numbers are.

***

To put it in perspective, imagine if you wanted to know how good a school's test scores were, and you did the following:

1) Instead of grading the whole school, you hand-picked just your straight-A students to take the test.
2) Instead of grading these students on all subjects, you graded them on just one subject.
3) You also told these students the subject the test is going to be on in advance.
4) You also provided these students a list of questions that were going to be on the test.
5) You also made the questions on the test easier than normal.
6) You also had many students drop out after they saw the questions on the test and decided that they didn't really want to take it.
7) To top it off, when you got back the test scores from this (pretty rigged) test and saw that half of the students got a 50% and the other half got a 100%, you observed that 75% of the total items were answered correctly, and you lied about the test scores by erroneously presenting that result as "75% of the students received a passing score." :D

Now for comparison here's what these 7 Cups studies have done:

1) Most of these studies are based on sampling elite listeners who are either Verified or have an average listener score 4.5 or higher.
2) Most of these studies are looking at specialized/targeted populations suffering from just one specific type of mental disorder.
3) Most of these studies told the listeners the target population they were going to be interacting with.
4) Most of these studies gave their listeners special training prior to the study that provided specific guidance on how to interact with that target population.
5) Most of these studies used members who were concurrently receiving multiple other forms of assistance, including psychotherapy outside of 7 Cups, special self-help programs targeting their specific problems, and in some cases in-person coaching and technical guidance on how to use the 7 Cups website.
6) Some of these studies had significant listener drop-out rates where only a small portion of listeners actually completed the training program and decided to finally participate in the study. (Sort of like ghost chats?)
7) The "97% of people view their listener positively" statistic appears to come from a 4-item Likert scale survey of N=9 respondents (haha) where 97% of total items answered (35 out of 36) had positive responses (i.e. either a 4 or a 5 on a 5-point scale).

#7 was the point at which I burst into laughter, started yelling at my computer monitor, and decided I needed to go for a walk. :)

***

As another example, here's the data that I think 7 Cups is relying on to support the claim that "80% of people believe listeners can help people with mental health issues".

This was a survey of N=10 respondents suffering from schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. They interacted with listeners who had been on 7 Cups for at least 2 months, had a listener score of 4.5 or higher (based on at least 20 reviews), and had completed a training program on how to support people experiencing schizophrenia/psychosis. (I didn't really mention small N's, but that's another problem with these studies.)

***

3 of the 4 studies involve conditions similar to what I've described above in #'s 1-6. (#7 was just a particularly egregious jewel that leaped out at me and caught me by surprise.)

So, there is only one study that is actually potentially generalizable to 7 Cups as most people currently experience it. This was an exploratory/pilot study done in 2015 (has the user base of the site changed since then?) that involved a convenience sample with a 30% response rate based on members who managed to find and click a banner displayed in the forum.

Now... honestly, I have no idea whether a casual/first-time user of this site would even be able to find the forum (lol) to click on this banner. Or if they did find it, why they would feel the desire to go looking there... unless if they were already pretty enamored with the site. So, right off the bat, there is a potential self-selection bias that might be skewed toward positive experiences of 7 Cups. But even within that limited set of people who managed to find the banner, only 30% of the people who saw the banner ended up completing a survey. So, there are multiple layers of possible bias (which is why the author called it an exploratory study and indicated that it used a convenience sample).

From what I can tell, only 1 of the 5 statistical results cited on the 7 Cups research page comes from this paper (the one saying that 70% of people thought listeners were as helpful or more helpful than psychotherapists). So, you have 4 findings based on studies that are far removed from the actual conditions or experiences that exist on a day-to-day basis on 7 Cups... and 1 finding that comes from a pilot study with pretty significant methodological weaknesses.

***

Just to be clear, I have no qualms with the studies themselves. They all appear to be thoughtfully designed, self-aware of their limitations, and intentionally working under specific conditions in order to answer the questions that they are interested in. My gripe isn't so much with the research papers or the researchers as it is with 7 Cups for misinterpreting or misrepresenting the findings of those papers. Whether it was deliberate or accidental, they're creating the illusion of a scientific support that doesn't really seem to exist (at least based on the known findings that they have presented).

I apologize for the multiple/lengthy posts, but I also had another stream of thought arise from investigating these studies that I feel intersects with something I've seen discussed here and elsewhere... which is how to improve 7 Cups.

My previous post was a bunch of stuff saying, "These studies have amazing results, but they don't work because 7 Cups in general doesn't look anything like the stuff that's happening in these studies." So I wonder, what if the problem is flipped on its head and I ask, "What kind of place would 7 Cups have to be in order for these studies to have relevance?" What direction do these studies point toward as far as possible site improvements?

Brainstorming:

1) Specific quality: These studies tended to limit themselves to really good listeners.
General quality: Highly capable listeners where less capable listeners are weeded out or not engaged with as much.

Recommendations:
-Create a site-wide culture of encouraging members to use "Browse Listeners" to search for highly rated or verified listeners as the first/primary/preferred way of getting into a chat... instead of throwing people into the dumpster fire that is the General Request queue and praying that they get someone halfway decent (after waiting 5-10 minutes).

2) Specific quality: These studies tended to involve very targeted groups of people. The listeners who participated tended to self-select ahead of time and know exactly what they were getting themselves into. Both the members and listeners generally knew before they started chatting what the chat would be about and what to expect from it.
General quality: Allowing members to more easily express/identify themselves as belonging to a specific group or category of people--and allowing listeners able to make informed decisions about who they are chatting with, avoid people they aren't well-suited for, and select appropriate chats based on their interests/motivations/compatibility.

Recommendations:
-Encourage listeners to write profiles that are evocative/expressive and will attract members who are likely to be compatible with them.
-Redesign "Browse Listeners" to be more profile-centric (e.g. by increasing the amount of profile text that can be displayed in that screen for each search result--so that members can make more informed choices).
-Allow members to write short blurbs that appear in General Request queue beside their name. (I find it a bit silly that currently when Noni asks questions and members respond, that written text is completely invisible to prospective Listeners until they're already in a chat--at which point it's inappropriate/too late for them to exit. What if those screener questions or more open-ended ones were actually used to help match listeners/members up with one another?)

In general, I feel strongly that both members and listeners benefit if they have more information and expressive potential to be able to self-segregate based on compatibility.
-As a listener, I'd feel more effective/efficient in being able to chat selectively with people who I know I am likely able to benefit
-As a member, I'd feel safer, more comfortable, and more cared for if I were to know that the person who decided to chat with me specifically decided they wanted to talk to me and wasn't simply randomly drawing my name from a hat
-The main reason I prefer the forums is that it gives me greater information, freedom, control, and predictability in what type of people/content I interact with--rather than being randomly plopped into one-on-one chats and spending the first 10-15 minutes of every chat trying to build rapport without having any idea what type of person I'm talking to.
-Currently, one-on-one chats suffer from inefficiency due to lack of information. Imagine if you had a dating site where you weren't able to know anybody's gender prior to messaging them... and that basically describes the current state of the 7 Cups General Request queue. (And to a lesser degree the Browse Listeners page.) Profile pictures and vague/general diagnostic tags aren't giving me what I'm seeking in that realm. It feels to me like everybody is playing Russian roulette.

3) Specific quality: These studies provided listeners with training materials that were tailor-made based on the target group to help listeners apply the optimal strategy/approach for the people who they were going to be chatting with.
General quality: Relevant/targeted training based on specific sub-groups or categories of members, where the listener has some knowledge/understanding in advance of what the best practices are for that cohort.

Recommendations:
-Redesign listener training/certification materials to be more practically relevant as far as tips for how to chat with specific types of people (while maintaining compatibility with active listening strategies advocated by this site). Just knowing certain basic do's/don't's, things that people suffering from certain things tend to greatly appreciate or greatly dislike or want others to know about them, things that they have found personally helpful, etc. and creating a repository/space for all of that information.
-Have community members participate in creating these materials. I imagine that the community has a TON of knowledge about this. Just taking LGBT chats as an example... LGBT members who have had very negative or positive chat experiences can share what helped and what didn't help. Listeners who are experienced with LGBT chats could share things that they noticed had positive effects. Listeners who have made mistakes could also share those experiences to help others avoid stepping on the same landmines. This could also help provide a path for people to constructively leverage/utilize/channel built-up frustration and suffering caused by some of the deficits of the current 7 Cups listener base.
-Create dedicated/organized spaces for these materials. My guess is that much of this collective wisdom already exists and I'm just completely unaware of it because it's lost in the forum/wiki. :)

@frigidstars27 I completely agree

It's like Hoffman said in his article:

[Paul] Graham knows he's doing the wrong thing. He confessed...that even though doing the right thing would work out better for him in the long run, he just isn't getting enough positive feedback, so it's psychologically intolerable...

It's clear that 7 Cups has the same approach, learned from Graham, needing positive feedback even if it means doing the wrong thing.

Charlie