Geoff Arnold's Blog

As I was driving home this evening, I caught an interesting little story on NPR’s All Things Considered entitled Born in the ’50s: Beliefs, Now and Then

As Judge Samuel Alito testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Robert Siegel talks with Alito’s contemporaries — those who are 55 or so — to see how much they and their views have changed since they were 35.

And so they interviewed a number of people who, like Alito, were born in 1950, and asked them how their views had changed over the last 20 years. And I found this particularly interesting, because I too was born in 1950. So how have my views changed over the last 20 years?
In 1985, the most important things in my life were my children – then 11 and 8 – and my job; I’d just joined Sun Microsystems. I didn’t pay too much attention to US national affairs, because I hadn’t quite adjusted to the fact that we weren’t just going to be here “for a couple of years”. But I didn’t think much about England, either: I was appalled by Maggie Thatcher’s selfish ideology. I was a citizen of the world! Of course politics was important, but the critical issue was the life-or-death concern with nuclear confrontation. Those were the days of films like Threads and The Day After, and Reagan joking about nuking the Soviets. But I don’t remember people at work arguing about these matters: they were distant, and we were curiously impotent.
And nobody talked much about religion. For the most part, it was a respectful and tolerant period: the arguments in schools were about Title IX (equal funding for girls’ sports), not evolution. I was active on Usenet in the alt.atheism newsgroup, helping to author the FAQ and starting to read philosophy of religion texts. But it was only for my personal interest.
Today? I think my views have hardened over the years, not mellowed. I’m appalled by the excesses of intolerance and hypertolerance that have sprung up. We have seen the emergence of a dichotomy between fundamentalism and unprincipled relativism, both of which have no time for reason, debate, and balance. Whether it be Pat Robertson’s ayatollah-like pronouncements, or Tony Blair seeking to make it illegal to say things that might upset someone, the world seems to have gone mad. And I do blame religion for much of it, for elevating the myths of a bunch of Iron Age nomads above reasoned debate in the here-and-now.
But, friends tell me, this is unfair. There are many people who are both religious and tolerant, observant and scientific. And of course this is true. Yet I can’t help feeling that many of these people give aid and comfort to the bigots by refusing to live up to their principles. A topical example: Pat Robertson explaining Ariel Sharon’s illness as divine retribution. Why can those who argue with Robertson not take the next, logical step, and rip out of their Bibles those texts which support Robertson’s thesis of a bloodthirsty and vengeful deity? If they don’t believe in such a deity, why do they treat those gory texts as “holy”? Surely their ethical principles are more important than a piece of text that was arbitrarily included in a book by a bunch of old men in the fourth century? (And, yes, the same applies to the Koran, and every other “sacred” book.)
I know, I know: if you start doing that, the whole house of cards comes crumbling down. Rational thought has no place in this domain. Even Thomas Jefferson couldn’t pull it off.
This abuse of religious ideas permeates so much. We have an immoral war being fought with callous disregard for the lives of the innocent and the moral integrity of the USA and UK, with government-sanctioned torture, and it is all justified in Apocalyptic, almost Manichean language of freedom-lovers versus evil-doers.
I am much more cynical than I used to be, and less hopeful. I look at my grandson, Tommy, and I worry more about the world he will face than I did with my children. Do all grandparents feel that way? I hope I’m wrong. On the other hand, I’m learning so much these days – in computing, science, philosophy, travel. I’m still an engineer, but I spent more of my time thinking about how we practice engineering, as a collaborative, community effort. I expect to get back to product engineering in a year or two, but for now I’m learning and contributing in a different way. And that’s satisfying.
And curiously, I find myself more emphatically English than ever before. In part, it’s because America has become so alien. When George Bush Senior said “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God”, I thought he was just pandering to his base. I was wrong. But in part it’s because of the Internet, and global communications. I read British newspapers every day, I watch English football and cricket, and PBS and BBC America bring me the news and the kind of entertainment that I grew up with. I never watch US programs (except for House, and the star of that series is as English as they come). I work with people around the world; in this respect I am a citizen of the world. Once or twice a year I return to England, and get in the rental car, and drive to Oxford: onto the M25, and then up the M40. And as I drive over the Chiltern scarp at Stokenchurch, and see the landscape spread out before me, I know I’m home.

I spent 90 minutes this morning at a focus group marketing survey event. Curiously, I’ve never heard my friends talk about participating in such a thing, nor have I seen blog comments. Perhaps everybody treats the non-disclosure agreement more strictly than I….
I think I can say a few things without violating the NDA. The focus group seemed to be concerned with the relationship between style and function in a certain category of products. I was shown into a room with six large posters, each illustrating various aspects of a different product in that category. It soon became apparent that one of alternatives these corresponded broadly to today’s product, while two represented design extremes (unattractively bland and unattractively overstyled). The remaining three choices were the ones that were really under consideration. Each represented a clear derivation from the existing product along a particular style axis.
I began by filling in a survey, in which various attributes or predicates were described and I had to rate how the attribute applied to each alternative product on a scale, from “completely” to “not at all”. One interesting twist was that many of the scales allowed for ‘overshoot’. For example, if I’d (hypothetically) been asked to rate how “cuddly” the product was, the range might have run from “not at all cuddly” through “neutral”, to “very cuddly”, and then “excessively cuddly”. Of course some of the attributes were hard to interpret (my favourite was “bold”!), and I made liberal use of the free-form comment space to describe how I’d interpreted the question.
Next I was shown the functional specs and price of each alternative. After studying these, I completed a slightly shorter survey in which I was asked to pay attention to all aspects of each product: style, features, and price.
All of that took about 50 minutes. I was then interviewed for 25 minutes, during which I had the opportunity to clarify and expand on my survey answers; we also dived into the details of certain aspects of particular products. And before I left, I was shown into a room with a different set of product posters (in a completely different product category) and asked to complete a quick survey on those. Clearly the company was running several parallel focus sessions, and were taking advantage of this to gather some extra data points.
Security seemed tight: no cellphones or other gadgets were permitted, and it was by invitation only. The sponsoring company was never named, but I guessed imediately who it was; during the interview I spent some time relating product style and features to corporate images. The process was very well designed; I felt that they had just the right number of people taking the survey at the same time, and just the right number of support staff. I received $125 for my services; truthfully, I would have done it for nothing, but it felt appropriate to get paid.
I learned one thing about myself. A number of the questions asked about buying intention: if this product was available with these features at this price, would you consider buying it? Usual 7-step spectrum answer, from “would definitely consider” to “definitely would NOT consider”. All of my answers were in the first or last columns – no “maybe” or “neutral” responses. During the interview, I interpreted this as follows: “the market is so full of competitive products that life is just too short to worry about maybes. Either something grabs me and seems worthy of serious attention, or I don’t have time for it.” I guess this is my response to the consumer confusion that comes from rampant choice in so many aspects of life (here in the First World, anyway).
Most enjoyable.