iPad Missed Opportunities Part 2: Remote Handset

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One thing that bothers me about the prospect of buying an iPad is that it means I’ll be carrying both an iPad and an iPhone, and there’s a lot of overlap between the two devices in terms of functionality. Worst of all, even though I already have “unlimited” data service through AT&T with my iPhone, I have to pay $30 for an additional “unlimited” data service for the iPad. Otherwise, I’m reduced to hunting for WiFi hotspots.

Thinking about this problem lead me to consider the following question: if I had an iPad, what would I use my iPhone for? It occurs to me that the iPhone really has 2 advantages over the iPad. The first advantage is that you can make voice calls over AT&T’s network. Though I think this is a big deal, it’s only a big deal because of circumstance. Right now, cell phones support voice much better and much more widely than they support data. If you were to have a robust, ubiquitous, and fast wireless data network, you should be able to make all of your voice calls using VoIP. Of course, you don’t want to hold your iPad up to your head like a phone, but you could easily get a Bluetooth headset or even a Bluetooth handset.

The second advantage that the iPhone has over the iPad is that it’s small. Of course, the advantage the iPad has over the iPhone is that it’s big, so being small isn’t absolutely better. However, in many contexts, being small is an advantage. The chief advantage of the iPhone being small is that you can stick it in your pocket. This means it’s much easy to take it everywhere with you, and just as importantly, it’s easy to access in any situation. When you’re standing in a crowded subway car, it’s much easier to reach in your pocket to pull out an iPod than it is to dig through your bag and pull out a notebook. Relating this back to the first advantage of the iPhone, you probably don’t want to have to pull out your iPad when you’re running around in the world and you need to make a phone call.

To address both of these problems, I think it might be good if Apple were to create a small Bluetooth iPad remote. I imagine that hardware-wise, it could look quite a bit like the iPhone but smaller and thinner. It would only connect to the iPad, so you wouldn’t need WiFi or cell connectivity. You could ditch most of the internal storage as well. The handset would retain the speaker, mic, touchscreen, battery, and perhaps a headphone jack.

The controls of the handset would expose 2 main functions: making and receiving phone calls and browsing through the media library on your iPad. The handset interface would have a dialer which would control the VoIP calls placed through the iPad’s data connection, and the handset would also “ring” like a handset when the iPad’s VoIP received an incoming call. During calls, you would talk through the handset like you would with a normal cell phone. Your voice would be picked up through the mic and sent to the iPad via Bluetooth. Incoming audio from the call would be sent to the handset’s speaker via Bluetooth as well.

The other use for this remote/handset would be to allow a user to store all of his music on the iPad and listen to the music on-the-go without actually needing to pull out the iPad every time he wants to change songs or adjust the volume.  The menu system could look identical to the iPhone’s normal music playback, but instead be controlling remote playback of the iPad.

Actually, the idea of a iPhone-like remote control for the iPad isn’t too far removed from features that Apple already provides.  One of Apple’s early iPhone applications was one which allowed you to use the iPhone as a remote control for an Apple TV or even any computer running iTunes.  It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Apple to expand this application to allow remote control of an iPad.

iPad Missed Opportunities Part 1: Docking Station

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So in the last post, I talked about some of the iPad complaints that I thought were unfair. There are a few that I think are quite fair, such as the fact that you’re locked into Apple’s iTunes store and can’t install software from other sources. Also, I’ve read that it’s a bit of a pain to get documents on and off of the iPad.

However, what I find most interesting are the missed opportunities for making the iPad even more useful, including improvements that could still be made post-launch.

The first big missed opportunity in my mind was that Apple didn’t make use of this patent:

For years I’ve thought that my ideal computing experience included something roughly like the iPad: a small lightweight tablet about the size of a standard sheet of 8.5×11″ paper with a highly refined touchscreen interface.  However, the problem with a device of this form factor is that working on a small touchscreen for a long time isn’t as comfortable as working with a nice big monitor, keyboard, and mouse.  So in my ideal computing experience, I would be able to dock this tablet to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for projects that require more intensive computer use.  Ideally I would have access to all the same documents and applications whether I was using the computer in touchscreen-mode or docked-mode, but I would always be presented with an interface that was optimized for whichever mode I was in.

Of course, this concept presents a lot of complications.  Not only would the OS need to host two totally different context aware user interfaces, but application developers would need to create two interfaces for each application as well.  The tablet would also need to be powerful enough to run a full desktop operating system and full desktop applications, while being energy efficient enough to allow several hours of battery life while in tablet mode.  The technology isn’t there yet.

However, what Apple could probably do is allow the iPad to be used to host user profiles.  Technologically, this would be a very different approach, but it could achieve similar results.  The idea would be that you permanently store all of your documents and media on your iPad, and when you dock your iPad to your computer, instead of syncing, your computer automatically mounts the iPad’s filesystem and uses it for your home folder.

You computer’s iTunes wouldn’t store all your music on the hard drive and then sync your music to the iPad, but instead it would store all of your music on the iPad.  When you ran iWork on your computer, it would read the Pages document directly from your iPad and edit it on your iPad’s internal storage.  When you disconnected your iPad from your computer, you would have access to the same exact document through your iPad’s copy of Pages.  When you looked at your task list in your computer’s version of Things, it would be reading and altering the same database that your iPad’s version of Things would alter.  This would also allow you to dock your iPad to any number of computers and essentially take your whole home folder, settings and all, from computer to computer relatively seamlessly.  If Apple really wanted to, they could even get fancy by supporting automatic backups of your iPad through Time Machine.  Or they could even allow you to store a cached version of your iPad on the computer so that you could work when your iPad was disconnected, which would automatically sync when the iPad was docked or connected on a local network.  Or perhaps an even crazier idea: the iPad could automatically sync all of its contents online via MobileMe’s iDisk.

I believe all of this is possible with current technology.

Unfair iPad complaints

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the iPad and considering whether to buy one myself. In reading some of the reviews and responses, I’ve encountered a set of complaints, many of which I don’t think are entirely fair, and I wanted to share my thoughts:

No Flash support

The iPad does not support Adobe Flash, which seems to upset a lot of people.  From my standpoint the fact that Flash has become so ubiquitous is improper and even scary.  Flash is a bad thing (unstable, insecure, slow resource hog), and if Apple had to choose to include Flash or not include Flash, one or the other, I’d prefer that they didn’t.  I’m also glad they don’t have Silverlight, and I don’t see much of a difference.

In my view, these technologies are good for approximately 2 things: games and video.  With the advent of HTML 5, I hope all sites will be moving away from using Flash for video.  I know there are people who will argue with this, but it’s not really the topic I want to address here.  Flash games: I can live without them.  Flash ads: I’d like to actively block them.

Multitasking

I’ve read a lot of people complaining that iPhone OS is technologically backward because it doesn’t support multitasking.  In truth, it already supports multitasking, it just limits the access 3rd party developers have to that capability.  There are a couple of good reasons for this.  First, no one has built a good enough UI (User Interface) into managing background applications.  Windows Mobile and Android based phones both get a lot of user complaints that boil down to having too many applications running in the background without a clear UI for seeing what’s running or a clear UI for closing them.

Second, most applications don’t have a lot of need for running in the background in a system like this.  For example, when you’re reading an ebook, it takes up the whole screen.  When your writing a note in the “Notes” application, it takes up the whole screen.  You aren’t split-screening, doing both a the same time, the way you would on a computer.  There’s nothing about these programs that needs to keep running– like when you leave the ebook reader, there’s no benefit to leaving it running in the background, using up system resources, rendering an invisible book.

Therefore, what you really need are (a) for programs to be able to save their state when quitting so that you don’t lose data; and (b) a good notification system for the programs that need it.  Essentially, I don’t need my full mail application and my full IM application and my full phone application all running in the background on my iPhone all the time.  I need to get an appropriate alert when I receive a phonecall or an email or an IM.

No ports/expandability

I’ve read some complaints about the iPad not having built-in card readers, USB ports, or an audio line-in.  I think there are probably many reasons for this, including keeping the size/weight down and keeping the price low.  However, I think some of the reason that the iPad lacks expandability is that Apple is managing user expectations.  If you put a USB port on the iPad, then people are going to expect that they can plug in their peripherals and have them work.

This presents some problems.  First, it means that Apple has to develop a large base of drivers for all these devices.  When you plug something into USB on your computer and it works, it’s not magic; there are loads and loads of various pieces of software sitting around on your computer on the off chance that you plug in a piece of hardware that uses that software.  Unless Apple puts all that software on the iPad then your USB devices won’t work anyway.  Then we’d be hearing complaints like, “Why did Apple put a USB port on this thing if I can’t use any of my USB peripherals?”

So why doesn’t Apple simply include all of the necessary software and drivers to support various USB peripherals?  Well… then you’re opening a whole other can of worms.  Let’s say Apple put a USB port on the iPad and I plug in one of the simplest and most common USB peripherals: a mouse.  Most users would expect that a mouse cursor would then appear, and they could use a mouse instead of the touchscreen capabilities.  However, the UI isn’t designed to be operated by a mouse; everything is big and spaced far apart.  Apple specifically avoiding replicating the mouse-driven interface on this device, and I suspect as a result, it wouldn’t be a terribly fun device to navigate by mouse.  So that diminishes the user experience. Even worse, allowing people to use a mouse with the iPad would encourage developers to create mouse-driven interfaces, which would in turn make for a poor experience when using the touchscreen.  So then you end up with a split between apps designed to be used with the touch screen and apps designed for the mouse.  Confusing.  Apple doesn’t like “confusing”.

Beyond that, you’d have extra hard drive space taken up by the mouse drivers and any associated software (e.g. calibration software), and you’d lose any CPU or battery power that got devoted to running those drivers.  Plus, the mouse would draw power from the USB port, which would drain battery life.  One of the key things that Apple seems to be very proud of is the iPad’s battery life: 10 hours of watching video; 1 month standby time.  They achieve this by using a low-power processor and carefully managing the resources, which probably means loading no more drivers than are necessary, not running applications in the background except when necessary, and not using any powered ports.

So for putting an extra port on the iPad (which would cost a little extra per unit, possibly require extra engineering of the case), you get almost no extra functionality and decreased battery life.  There actually is a USB connector built-in to the iPod docking connector, but the dock connector includes other things too (e.g. audio/video out, remote control support).  Plus the dock connector is skinner and is a little less likely to break anything if you yank on it, since it’s not as deep. Bluetooth devices, on the other hand, have their own power sources.  By forcing peripherals to use the dock connector, it ensures that people will only be trying to plug in devices that are designed specifically for iPhones/iPads.

Managing expectations

I think how you see the iPad of this depends on your expectations. If you’re expecting the iPad to be a full computer in tablet form, then I think you’ll end up being disappointed. I don’t think Apple is even aiming for it to be a full computer. It’s more like a device, like an iPod or an Apple TV. Or think of it like an XBox. Would you complain that you can’t do multitasking on your XBox? That you can’t play a video game and type a term paper on your XBox at the same time?

Essentially, the iPad isn’t meant to replace your computer. You know how you used to carry around a disc-man and a bunch of CDs, and that got replaced by an iPod? Well now the iPad is replacing your books and your moleskin notebooks, but also maybe your TV, iPod, and PDA. Not a bad accomplishment, if it pulls it off effectively.

Fragmentation III

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Ok, I didn’t mean to talk so much about data fragmentation in the Internet age, but it has been an issue that has bothered me for a while and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. The third (and perhaps final) topic that I wanted to cover was document/media storage. The prior two articles were essentially about messaging, but now I want to talk about the places where you store your documents, your music, and your movies.

Just to start off with the example of my own data, I own 3 computers: a laptop, a desktop, and a home server. I also have a smart phone and a set-top box that holds movies. I have a separate work computer at work, and I have a couple different web hosts. Those are a lot of different places where I might store data. Mostly there’s good reason; I keep my work data on my work computer and my personal data on my home computer, and I want to keep them separate. On the other hand, I have a set of documents that I want to have accessible on my laptop and desktop, backed up on my home server, and maybe backed up online. That sounds simple enough, right?

It’s not. It should be simple, it’s almost simple, but there are always niggling little details. I won’t go into all the technical details of all the solutions I’ve tried and why they don’t quite work. Yes, there are workable solutions (rsync, unison, Dropbox, or working directly on a server), but I believe this problem really needs to be solved comprehensively for everyday computer users.

Some people will of course suggest “thin clients” or “cloud computing” or “Internet operating systems”, but I think all of these solutions have real problems, one of the big problems being that if the server goes down, everyone on that server is suddenly unable to work. People will counter by saying, “well you just distribute it across a bunch of servers so there’s no more single point of failure.” It’s harder than it sounds, and even if you accomplish that, what if the client’s Internet connection goes down.

One of the things it’s important to keep in mind is how cheap computing has gotten. We have more computing power in our cell phones than existed in the biggest computers a few decades ago, and we’re putting hundreds of gigabytes into USB thumb drives. It’s ultimately not going to save you much money to forgo internal storage and computing power for a thin client, so people are usually going to get a thicker client anyway. Once you have that internal storage and processing power, you may as well use it.

I think ultimately there are two solutions. The first would be to try to come up with elaborate syncing technologies which will enable you to always have all your data stored on the server but cached locally. This could have some nice effects. Imagine you open a word document on your desktop computer which, for all intents and purposes, appears to be stored locally on your hard drive. You start typing, and every change is immediately synced to an online server where it can be viewed and edited in a service like Google Docs. Meanwhile the changes are also being downloaded to each of your authenticated devices, including your cell phone and your laptop. If changes are being made through one of the other devices, you get something like the “collaborative real-time editing” in SubEthaEdit. Or imagine that when you take a picture on your cell phone, it was automatically uploaded to a service like Picasa, which in turn synced to it all of your computers. If you add a picture to your computer, it syncs back to your phone. We have the pieces for a solution like this, but it’s not comprehensive or well integrated as what we need.

The other solution is to go the other way and to try to put all of your data in a single place. It’s a pretty simple idea: put a big enough storage device in your cell phone so that it can hold your entire home directory. Put a standard dock on every computer you use, and set the computers up so that they’ll automatically mount the home directory during login. Of course, that can still get a little tricky if you’re using different platforms, and I don’t know of any platform that supports this use very well. Also, you’re going to want that data backed up, and you’re probably going to want to get some of that information online sooner or later, so it wouldn’t completely settle things.

On top of the rest of these things, there’s another detail that I think about now and then: all of us are putting a lot of money and effort into storing the same information over and over again. For example, I have the Radiohead’s album “The Bends” stored on my computer in AAC format. It’s also stored on my home server and my laptop, as well as my iPod. It’s also probably stored on millions of other computers around the world, but I still need to store myself and back it up, because if I ever lost those files, then I couldn’t get it back. If I went back to iTunes and asked to download it again, they wouldn’t let me. If I tried downloading it from another source, I’d be accused of being a pirate.

The vast majority of the data on my computer is like that. All my documents and pictures take up a couple of gigabytes, and the rest is copyrighted material that probably exists on lots of other computers around the world. Still, I have to concern myself with backing up the copies on my computer as though I have a unique copy. In some ways, this is a very uninteresting problem, but it raises a question in my mind: what if we looked at issues like data storage and backup for a society as a whole rather than on the individual level? All of Radiohead’s “The Bends” probably takes up less than 100 megabytes on my computer, but just by myself I have it copied on 5 different devices, not including backups to external hard drive or DVD. That’s half a gigabyte right there. How much storage do you think is taken up worldwide, storing just that one album? How many terabytes? Are we making efficient use of our time, effort, and resources?

Honestly, I’m not sure how much it matters. I believe that there are probably better ways to deal with some of these issues, but copyrights and proprietary intests will probably prevent significant improvements from being made in the foreseeable future.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

Fragmentation II

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To continue talking about fragmentation, I feel like there’s an inherent problem with online social networking. It’s all fine so long as you stick with a single site for social networking, but otherwise it gets messy. You like Facebook, all your friends are on Facebook, and you never leave Facebook? Then everything is peachy-keen.

What happens when some of your friends are on Twitter and you’re using LinkedIn for your professional contacts? Well now you have a couple more profiles to manage, a couple more places to check for messages, and a couple more places to post your status.

Now your contacts on these sites probably overlap a little; some of your Facebook friends are also LinkedIn contacts. So now you want to send them a message. Do you send it through normal email, or through one of these sites? If you send it through one of these sites, which one?

Or your information changes and you want to post an update to your profile. Now you have multiple profiles in multiple places to update. Your probably also have an old Friendster profile that’s way out of date because you can’t even remember the login information. Does that matter? Is anyone still on Friendster, and do they care that your information is old? I don’t know. It’s probably not a big deal, but we certainly haven’t been forward-thinking in coming up with these things.

If you ask me, there needs to be an open standard for online profiles that enable connections across sites. I should be able to use Facebook if I want, and my friend should be able to use LinkedIn, and we should still be able to befriend each other and see each other’s status updates. Everyone should only need a single online profile, and that profile should have standard machine-readable parts.

I should be able to write a script that can crawl my friends’ profiles, collect all of their blog addresses, and set up a consolidated RSS newsfeed of all of their blog posts. I should be able to set my desktop address book application to crawl my online profile, go through all my friends’ profiles, and populate my address book with the most recent profile picture and contact information available. When I add a contact to my address book, it should be able to ask me whether I want to add them as a friend and automatically put in the friend request regardless of what network they’re on.

Of course, this is unlikely to happen anytime soon, and not because of technological hurdles. The bigger problem is that Facebook has no incentive to open up. They need you try to force you to use their service in order to interact with their membership, and they need you to visit their site in order to use their services. The whole point is ad revenue.

I will admit that there’s one sense in which the fragmentation is advantageous: keeping your social networks separate. I’d like to be able to manage my profile in one place, but I don’t want my boss seeing the same information that my old college friends see, and I might not even want all of my college friends to see the same information. This presents some problems, and keeping different profiles could be helpful. However, having multiple social networking sites don’t actually help. Even if you try to make LinkedIn professional and Facebook personal, there’s nothing to keep your professional contacts from trying to befriend you on Facebook.

I think the best long-term solution has to be enabling people to make and maintain a single profile in one place, but having more fined grained control over which information gets displayed to whom. You should be able to put both your work email address and personal email address into the same profile, but maybe only show the work address to work contacts and personal address to personal contacts. Ideally, being able to create different profiles would also provide an opportunity for some plausible deniability: you could befriend someone and allow them to only see a small subset of your profile, but they wouldn’t need to know how much of your profile they were seeing. You could befriend your boss and parents while being careful to ensure that they can only see information on your profile that shows you to be a fine, upstanding citizen. Alternatively, you could post about your love for My Little Pony without sharing that information with your tough-guy friends. Somehow, it needs to emulate how we deal with real people in real life– we show different facades under different circumstances.

I don’t think those sorts of controls would be too difficult to develop technologically. The real problem would be making the controls simple and fool-proof. The settings would need to be clear enough that users would have no trouble understanding who would be able to see the information, simple enough that a user would have no trouble achieving the results they want, and convenient enough that it wouldn’t harm the user’s experience of the site. Finally, the privacy controls would need to be refined in such a way that mistakes were unlikely– there’s no point in developing all these fancy privacy settings only to accidentally post information about your sex life where your parents can read it.

Well I think that’s all for now. Stay tuned for part 3.

Fragmentation

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It’s a minor complaint, but I’m a little put off by the fragmentation of information in the modern Internet age.

For example, I just signed up for a Facebook account after years of avoiding social networking sites. I was also excited to get a Google Wave account recently, and I like some of the things that I can do with that service. As good as these services are, the same thing struck me after using them for a short time: this does not ultimately lessen the complexity of my online life.

Right now, I have multiple email accounts. I have one for work, one for notifications and spam, and one for personal email. I have 4 IM accounts so that I can communicate with people on various services. Essentially Google Wave and Facebook give me more accounts to manage, more things to check, more fragmentation, and more confusion. In Facebook, I can set notifications to email me, but then I still have a copy of that notification sitting in Facebook. Now I have to manage the same set of notifications in two different places.

If someone wants to send me a quick text message, do they send me an IM through my gmail account? Through AIM? Through Facebook? I have accounts in all three. Or should they SMS me? Or just send me an email? There are subtle differences in the features of each of these services and in the etiquette, but even I get my own accounts confused.

What’s the point of all this? My phone has IM, SMS, and email. Send me any one of those, and I’ll pretty much get it just the same. I can appreciate the difference between IM and email– short form vs. long form communication– but the rest of this is just pretty silly.

In my opinion, Google is heading in the right direction. You can get all your email and SMS and IM messages stored in the same mailbox. You can get your voicemail transcribed and sent to that same inbox, too. Plus they allow server-side filtering of email and their tagging system is more flexible than sorting everything into mailboxes. Still, there are some holes in the system.

Besides the fact that Gmail does nothing to tame all of the other streams of information you might have to deal with, their systems are still making use of the same clumsy old protocols. More couple probably be done to protect against spam and to make encryption easier. I’ve always thought it’d be useful if there were standard tagging in emails and other embedding of metadata in such a way that it could be recognized by all email clients and be sent along with a message.

To illustrate that last point, I think it’d be good if we could develop an etiquette where mass emails sent for the purpose of announcements could be tagged “announcement”, mass emails that are jokes could be tagged “joke”, or threaded political discussions could be tagged appropriately. This would allow easier filtering and make it easier for recipients to understand whether the email was important to them. Right now, the only options available are a the subject of the email and the body, both of which are completely free form and focused about the content and presentation of the information, and not around the metadata. Being able to include additional metadata about the message and the sender and the recipient might even allow for better spam filtering. For example, being able to include a unique personal identifier in your outgoing messages could allow people to identify you more easily even when you’re sending email from a different account. Another possibility is that friends could agree to include a specific tag as a sort of password that allows the message to bypass all spam filters.

Perhaps I’ll write more on this topic later. For now, I need to go.

Healthcare reform

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To all the people who find themselves concerned with the health care reform proposals going on now, particularly those who are worried about socialized healthcare, I would like to explain why I don’t think you should be worried. I’m not going to try to debunk some of the hysterical claims about things like “death panels” because they’ve already been debunked in other places. Also, I’m not going to argue that creating a new socialized healthcare system will be better than our current capitalist free-market system. On the contrary, what I’d like to argue is that our current system is already a socialized system and not a free-market system, and therefore it’s nonsensical to worry about “socializing” it.

This might seem like a strange claim– we have private insurance systems, so how could that be socialist? First of all, the government already subsidizes the healthcare industry, including health insurance companies. The reason we commonly get our health insurance policies through our employers is that money spent on health insurance is classified as an expense for your employer, and therefore is not taxed. It’s also not counted as income for the employee, and so it’s not taxed there either.

Now a tax break like this is a funny thing, because in one sense tax breaks are simply the government taking less of your money. However, if you start from the supposition of a flat tax, then every targeted tax break could be viewed as a subsidy. Some people find this hard to understand, but imagine a store which is selling an item at full price, and then providing an immediate $20 refund at the cash register. If you’re paying with cash, you get cash back. If you’re paying with credit, $20 gets credited to your credit card. Now is that any different than the store simply selling the item for $20 less? Effectively, no. In the same way, there’s not a significant difference between viewing a tax structure with deductions as being the same as a flat-tax system with subsidies. Essentially, the government is subsidizing everything that they’re allowing tax deductions for.

Once you consider this, you realize that by not taxing health insurance, the government is essentially subsidizing your employer’s purchase of health insurance, and thereby subsidizing the health insurance providers themselves. And it makes sense, because who would buy health insurance if it were not subsidized? It’s the nature of insurance that the average cost to the policy holder must be more than what they receive back from the insurance company. If this weren’t the case, the insurance company could have no operating budget. Because of this, insofar as health insurance pays for regular care (checkups and medication), healthy people will generally pay more into the system then they receive back in terms of care by the amount of their share of the operating costs and profit of the insurance company.

So just making numbers up on the spot, imagine 10 million healthy people all buy insurance from the same company, each person spending $2,000/month. That means the health insurance company receives $240 billion per year. Now let’s say that it takes $100 million per year to run the insurance company, and they expect a $20 million annual profit. That means the customers can only get an average of $1,999 per year in coverage. Now that’s not too bad to only lose a dollar, but it’s not gaining you anything.

Now imagine half of those 10 million people get sick, and need an average of $3,000 in care one year. That means that healthy people are only able to get $999 worth of coverage for their $2,000 expense. It’s not a great value for the healthy people, but that’s how insurance works. So in another sense, health insurance itself is a socialist system already, even without the government subsidy. It is a method of socializing the costs of health treatment rather than expecting each person to pay for their own health care costs.

Of course the problem is that, in a free market, health insurance wouldn’t work. People who believe themselves to be healthy generally wouldn’t buy health insurance because it’s not a good value for them. In my made-up example, they have to pay $2,000 for $999 worth of services. However, if you look at what happens to my example when the healthy people leave the system, suddenly everyone is paying for $2,000 for average of $3,000 worth of coverage, which cannot possibly be profitable for the health insurance company. They’ll have to raise their rates. Now the healthier portion of the sick people are no longer getting a good value, since the same model prevails and the people with cheaper care are subsidizing those with more expensive care, so they might very well drop out of the system too. The likely outcome is that, if health insurance would exist at all, it would be only for catastrophic coverage and would be no more common than life insurance or maybe renter’s insurance. That is to say, some people might buy it, but many people wouldn’t.

And this is why the government subsidizes health insurance through tax breaks, so that people get health insurance because they think it’s very cheap, when in fact it’s only cheap because we’re subsidizing it with tax dollars. Because of all this, I think it’s fair to claim that our current healthcare system is socialist– after all, it’s funded by the government with the goal of distributing costs, to take money from everyone and use it to provide for those who are in need.

What’s more, even if you look at those who can’t afford health insurance, their health care is still paid for by the rest of us. In some cases, the services are provided more directly by the government through systems like Medicare, but even in other cases the costs are still distributed among the rest of us. If someone without health insurance gets very sick, they go to the emergency room and simply don’t pay for the services they receive. This increases the operating costs of the hospital, which makes it necessary for the hospital to charge health insurance more for services provided to those who have health insurance. These increase in charge to the health insurance company in turn is passed to their customers, which we all pay for. We pay for it through our premiums and copayments and through our tax dollars which are used to subsidize health insurance. None of this comes free.

I find it interesting when opponents to reform, claiming to be in favor of free markets, also claim that we already have the best healthcare system in the world. Given that our system is already socialized, wouldn’t that mean that the best healthcare system in the world is a socialist healthcare system?

Laziness

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I’ve been pretty interested in the idea of laziness for most of my life, tracing back to the experience of having a teacher in middle school who regularly accused me of being lazy. It really made me wonder what it means to “be lazy”. Sure, I didn’t like working. But isn’t it the default state of human beings to be averse to work? You might think, “No, not me. I’m willing to work very hard.” Well yes, you may work very hard when hard work is required to attain something you desire, but that doesn’t mean you’re not averse to work.

Einstein is reported to have said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Similarly, I would say that people should work as hard as is necessary, but no harder. It’s important to keep in mind that “laziness” can be very useful. Avoiding spending your time on things that are neither necessary nor valuable will keep your work efficient and productive, and an aversion to work can, at times, produce superior results.

For example, in all the times I’ve worked doing IT support, I would say that it was laziness that drove me to do a good job. I didn’t want to continually run around fixing the same things over and over again, so I arranged everything as well as I could such that things wouldn’t break in the first place, and that when I fixed something it stayed fixed. From everyone else’s point of view, this meant that the entire network ran more smoothly and without interruption. From my point of view, it meant much less work in the long run.

Of course, even if we accept that being work-averse can be a healthy inclination, we might still want to claim that people are “lazy” when they are unwilling to the important work we see as needing to be done. However, just because we think a job is important doesn’t address whether anyone else is convinced that the work is worth doing, i.e. whether the effort required is adequately justified by the benefit derived from the doing the work. So if you ask someone to do a task and he refuses on the grounds that the task isn’t worth doing, it’s not laziness; you simply have some kind of a disagreement. It may be that you underestimate the amount of effort needed to complete the work or that he’s underestimating the benefit that will come from the work, or it may be that you two are both estimating the same cost and same benefit, but are disagreeing on how much effort that benefit is worth.

On the other hand, I believe that a lot of what we call “laziness” isn’t caused by disagreements of that sort, but are actually caused by an excessive amount of misdirected effort and not by a deficit of effort. For example, so-called “perfectionists” sometimes squander their effort by refusing to engage in any activities at which they won’t excel. Instead of putting their effort toward accomplishment, their effort is put into the avoidance of failure. Instead of focusing on what they’re going to do and how they’ll do it, we sometimes focus on the prospect that we won’t be able to do things well and we make efforts to avoid mistakes and to avoid situations where we might fail.

Sometimes this failure-avoidance takes the form of procrastination. If we believe ourselves currently unfit for a task, we may put those tasks off in the hopes that we’ll gain sudden insight in how to complete them or that the situation will magically improve as time passes. If we believe a task will become easier to complete later on, and we don’t perceive any negative consequences of waiting, then it makes perfect sense to put off until tomorrow that which you can do today.

I may be wrong, but I believe that this is a fairly exhaustive explanation of “laziness”– that we call someone “lazy” when their cost/benefit analysis differs from ours, or that the “lazy” person is in fact unsure how to proceed or unsure of his ability to succeed. You may be asking, why is this interesting? Am I just trying to excuse my own laziness?

Well no, I’m not particularly trying to avoid blame or promote laziness, but I think this is important because it may be that there is no such thing as a person who is simply “lazy”. It may be that every “lazy” person is just someone who has no motivation to do the things we’d like them to do, someone who doesn’t believe that he will actually benefit from the work you’d like them to do, someone who is afraid of failure, or someone who doesn’t know where to begin. This is important to me because it suggests that, rather than writing people off as personally defective, we might be able to convince them to contribute something positive to our world.

So this would mean that, if someone isn’t motivated to help us solve the problems we’re facing, we have to learn to motivate them. If we disagree about the costs and benefits, then we can discuss them and reach an agreement. We can try to show people that they have an interest in improving the situation around them by demonstrating the various ways in which those things are connected to each of our best interests. When people don’t know where to begin, we can try to educate them on where they can get started. When they’re afraid of failure, we can encourage them to try their best.

And sometimes people will fail. We all fail, and we all have some false starts before we succeed. Perhaps we can begin by going easier on each other.

More comments on statistics

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Since my last post, I’ve had a couple of other thoughts on the deceiving nature of statistics. In the era of such scientific achievements, people are understandably inclined to view scientific study and statistical analysis as the most proper means of determining truth. However, properly understood, statistics are merely a means of making a “best guess” based on limited information, and not a magical method for determining actual patterns. So let’s examine the coin toss…

I’ve spoken with a couple people lately for whom it’s a dull surprise that, when flipping a coin, we shouldn’t expect the coin tosses to result in a heads, tails, heads, tails pattern. The reason they seemed to believe this is that, assuming a properly balanced coin, the chances of any given coin toss landing on heads is 50/50. So that means, in theory, if I toss a coin twice, chances are I’ll get 1 heads and 1 tails. Four times? 2 of each. Six times? 3 of each, and so on. These people therefore expect that, when you toss the coin twice, if it landed on heads the first time, it will likely land on tails the following toss, and so on.

As another example, a lot of people have this same sort of misunderstanding of statistics so as to think that a random mix of black and white pebbles should be likely to generate a roughly checkerboard pattern– black, white, black, white– when, in fact, a checkerboard pattern is very un-random (or to use a real word, ordered).

However, lets look at the instance of 6 a coin being tossed 6 times. What are the chances that this pattern will be maintained throughout the entire span of the six tosses? In other words, what are the chances of getting either a heads-tails-heads-tails-heads-tails or tails-heads-tails-heads-tails-heads? In fact, the chances are no better than getting 6 heads or six tails. For any number of tosses, the chances of getting an alternating pattern is equal to getting a straight/constant result.

The reason for this is that the probability of any exact pattern is exactly equal. Getting the pattern heads-heads-tails-heads is no more or less likely than the pattern heads-tails-heads-heads or heads-heads-heads-heads. The reason why 3 heads and 3 tails is the most likely result of 6 coin tosses is because of the 64 possible patterns, 3 heads and 3 tails is the most common sum, accounting for 20 of the 64 possible patterns.

Notice that, although 3 heads and 3 tails is the most likely result, it’s not an overwhelmingly likely result. if you had to bet on whether the result will be exactly 3 heads/3 tails, the smart money would be on “no”. As a noted, a 3 to 3 split only accounts for 20 of the 64 patterns, meaning there’s roughly a 30% chance of reaching that result. However, the combinations reaching a result of 2/4 either way (either 2 heads and 4 tails or 4 heads and 2 tails) is more likely than that. In other words, the most probable result is probably not going to happen.

Now, all of this (along with my other post) is to say that, though statistical analysis is an extremely useful tool, statistics is only a predictive tool in an essentially unpredictable world, and it’s easy to put too much stock in the power of numbers to reveal truth.

Impossible things happen every day

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There’s this funny thing I like to point out to those who are too quick to dismiss things as impossible: According to statistics, the most statistically unlikely things are likely to happen. In fact, we assume the impossible will happen, we rely on it, and if statistically improbable events never occurred, we would live in a very strange world.

Before you jump all over me for spouting nonsense, think about it for a second. Let’s take, for instance, event A, and the chances of event A happening to any given person at any given time is about 1 in one-billion. So when you say, “What are the chances of event A occurring to me right now?” The answer is, “That’s almost impossible. It’s a one-in-a-billion shot.”

But that applies to any given time, so look at any particular person, over the scope of their entire lives. How many moments are there in a person’s life? So instead of, “What are the chances that event A will happen to me right now,” let’s ask “What are the chances event A will happen to me ever?”

Now look at the billions of people in the world, each of them with so many moments in their lives. So suddenly the chances of event A happening to some person at some time become quite good. This much should be pretty obvious. Think of the lottery. What are the chances of me winning the lottery today? Astonomically small. What are the chances that someone will win, sometime? It’s very unlikely that no one will every win the lottery again.

Now, (and here’s where I think it gets interesting) consider all the other 1 in a billion possibilities. There’s event A, (let’s say winning the lottery) but there’s also event B (meeting your long-lost twin), C (getting struck by lightning), D (travelling backwards through time), each unlikely. What are the chances that one of them, A, B, C, or D, will happen to someone at some time? It’s pretty well guaranteed. But that’s only four unlikely possible events. How many possible unlikely events are there? Uncountable.

When you figure this in, that something statistically unlikely will happen to someone at some time is pretty much guaranteed. In fact, it becomes likely that very unlikely things are happening all the time. It becomes statistically impossible for statistically-impossible things to not happen. Of course, this relies on a certain indeterminacy about which unlikely things will happen when and to whom, but it’s still worthwhile to remember that impossible things happen every day.