John Pescatore

I’m a big public library kind of guy. There’s something about the experience of standing in front of a big shelf of brand new books that Amazon, eBay, Apple, NetFlix, whoever just can’t replicate online. I usually try to take out at least one non-fiction book every time I’m there.  I recently read two interesting, related books:

• SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable, Bruce Hood – Hood details many studies and goes through the science of why the majority of the world’s population is religious or believes in supernatural phenomena.
• Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human, Ellen Kaplan and Michael Kaplan – this mother/son team (historian/writer) take a more anecdotal approach to explaining why “Our species, it appears, is hardwired to get things wrong in a myriad of different ways.”

Both are fun reads and both reinforce how long (thousands of years) it takes for human behavior to change, which I’ve observed in seeing how little user behavior has changed after 20 years of routine PC use and close to a decade of routine internet use.  The books both also point out how many of our bad habits are actually key to the long term survival of our species, even though they lead to much mayhem in the short run. Unfortunately, we all live and work in the short run.

That’s why I always rail against the myth of the “responsible” user. The day I see slot machines in casinos standing unused because there are no more hopeful people willing to feed their paychecks into a machine that advertises !!!97% PAYBACK!! is the day I know PC users will stop clicking on links that will cause bad things to happen…

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