Terry Jones

OK, this has nothing to do with calculus, but I wanted a short title. Better would have been On the monotonically decreasing incentive to keep secrets, etc.

If you have a secret and you tell someone, it makes no sense to tell them they can’t tell anyone else.

Let’s say there are 2 kinds of secrets you might be tempted to pass along: a) those that are more important to the receiver than they are to you (e.g., you just found out that X is sleeping with your friend Y’s partner and you’re considering telling Y), and b) those that are less important to the receiver than they are to you.

Clearly it doesn’t make much sense to tell the receiver in class (a) that they can’t tell anyone. They probably have less incentive to be telling people than you do, they’re closer to the source than you are, and perhaps the information is “theirs” more than it is “yours”. Things like that.

But it doesn’t make sense to tell the receiver in class (b) that they can’t tell anyone either. That’s because it’s unreasonable to expect them to keep something secret that you’re not keeping secret when it’s even less important to them than it is to you. Even if you swear them to secrecy, as you may have been sworn to secrecy, you can’t rationally expect them to keep the secret.

Most secrets fall into class (b).

The rational and responsible conclusion is that either you decide that the buck stops with you and you don’t pass it on, OR you decide to pass it on, in the full knowledge that you are actively spreading the secret, and in fact lowering the barrier to it spreading more widely. At the very least, have the intellectual honesty not to preface the secret telling with “you can’t tell anyone about this…”

I often wonder if I’m super sensitive to issues in user interface, or if everyone notices the same things that I do.

For example, when I find things that are inconsistent in user interfaces it really bugs me. I’m sitting in front of a beautiful Apple cinema display attached to a laptop, all made by a company that clearly cares a lot about user interface. BUT, when I want to maximize something that’s iconized, I have to remember the command to do it on an application-by-application basis. Yes, I could reach for the mouse, but I don’t want to reach for the mouse.

If I want to get my iTunes window up, I can Apple-TAB to get to iTunes, and then to get the window up from the dock I have to Apple-Option-1. If I’m tabbing over to Terminal, I have to use Apple-1. If it’s iCal, there is no key combination to maximize the window. Duh.

Nokia care about user interface too. Yet on my cheap 6070 model, no doubt with a stock version of Series 60, when I go to delete things from the messaging area, the buttons I have to press depend on the type of thing I’m deleting. If it’s a text message, I click Left (Options), Select (Delete is the first option), and then Left (Yes, I want to delete). It’s the same for the Sent Items. It I try to delete a template, I have to click Left, Down, Select, Left. If it’s a sent email message, I have to click Left, Select, Select. There are various other items in there, and I bet they have differing delete sequences too.

Those would be such simple things to make more consistent, you would think. I find stuff like that in user interfaces all the time, and I always wonder why these companies with huge budgets don’t have someone who can see these things take a look at their products for what seem like glaring inconsistencies.