Learned Helplessness in Computing?

I know I should be revising, seeing that my Atomic and Laser Physics exam is mere hours away, but I ended up on another Wikipedia trek, and came across the article on learned helplessness. Reading through it, I found that I could make many connections with the currently depressing state of computing, and attributing it to the complexity and proprietaryness of software.

Learned helplessness is a much-studied psychological phenomenon, where a subject gives up trying to change their situation. An example cited consists of three groups of dogs; group A is a control group and are put into harnesses and left for the duration of the experiment; groups B and C are put into harnesses but are also given unpleasant electric shocks. Each group B dog has a lever in front of it which does nothing when activated, whereas each group C dog has a lever which turns off the shocks to that dog and one of the group B dogs. The dogs in group C learn that the lever turns off their shocks, and they use it whenever they start to get shocked. Group B dogs, however, learn that their lever does nothing, whilst their shocks seem to stop randomly (remember, each B dog is paired to a C dog's lever, so the B dogs don't know why their shocks stop).

After this stage of the experiment all of the dogs are put into part two. where they are unharnessed in a pen divided in two by a small partition. The half of the floor with a dog on is electrified, whilst the half without is normal. Dogs from groups A and C would hop over the partition, away from the electricity and thus away from the pain. They don't know that the other side's not electrified, but they have a go and find that it's not. The dogs from group B, however, just lie down on the electrified floor and whimper, as they are repeatedly electrocuted. They could hop over the partition, but don't bother trying. These dogs become depressed.

The conclusion of the experiment is that the sense of control is very important. Dogs in group B and group C got exactly the same shocks (since they were both controlled by group C's levers), but only group B got depressed. Essentially, they learned that nothing they did would stop the electricity, it just stopped randomly. They then applied this knowledge to the second situation and took the shocks, rather than trying the new possibility of jumping over the divide.

This can be seen in people, where some parents can end up neglecting their babies since they 'learn' that the child doesn't stop crying whether they give it attention or not, and thus ignore it, thinking they are helpless to stop its cries.

The psychological explanation for this is that the depressed subjects, in an attempt to rationalise the seemingly random lack of control, think of it as an inevitability ("Babies cry"), blame themselves ("I'm making it cry") and think of it as pervasive ("I'm a bad parent"). This learned helplessness digs a psychological hole which is notoriously difficult to break out of, and even causes feedback loops, for example a neglected child will cry more and have more problems than that of an attentive parent, thus reinforcing the "I'm a bad parent" and "I'm making it cry" beliefs. In fact, even knowledge of learned helplessness can make things worse, since it can act as a confirmation of the helplessness ("You've told yourself that you're helpless when you're actually not." "See? I TOLD you I was a bad parent!") and others can end up blaming the condition for things rather than the person ("It's not your fault that your baby's ill, you've learned to be helpless at looking after it." "Yes, you should probably take it away since I'm too learned-helpless to look after it.")

So, aside from knowing more being awesome, how does this apply to anything I'm interested in? Well I couldn't stop contrasting the explanations with computing. The dominant computing platform these days is Microsoft Windows which, although all software has bugs, seems to be full of them. A lot of these bugs are user interface related, where the required action to achieve the desired task is non-obvious, or a seemingly obvious action produces an unexpected result (which includes 'crashes', where a program disappears without the user telling it to). Although anyone more involved in software development would view these as bugs in the software which should be reported and fixed, frequently less technical users (which is the vast majority) view such things as inevitable ("Computers crash"), as their fault ("I made it crash") and pervasive ("I'm bad with computers"). Just look at the currently running adverts for the Which? PC Guide: A bunch of regular people saying how their computers keep messing up, and then an offer of a guide to show them how it's all their fault because they're doing it wrong.

Since I write software, I would say that the Which? PC Guide is a complete hack: It's fixing something in the wrong place. A broken piece of software should not be fixed by telling each and every user how to work around the broken bits, the software should be fixed so that nobody ever experiences those issues again. However, since it's proprietary software, nobody is allowed to fix it other than Microsoft (although there are numerous other hacks to work around the broken bits, some of which have created an entire industry, such as firewalls, anti-virus/spyware/adware programs, etc.).

The majority of computer users, however, do not think like me, since I am a group C dog: I know how to fix things. In fact, in human experiments into learned helplessness, it was found that people could concentrate more and solve problems more quickly in the presence of an annoying and distracting noise if they had a button which could turn it off, than those subjected to the noise without such a button, EVEN WHEN THE BUTTON WASN'T PRESSED. So on a Free Software system, where I know that it is possible for me to fix something if I truly wanted to, I don't get depressed, however on a proprietary system I frequently get annoyed, angry, irritated, etc. when the software behaves in undesirable ways.

For example, clicking a link that says "Download this program" in Idiot Exploiter 8 doesn't download the program, it just gives an subtle message under the toolbar that Internet Explorer has "protected" me by preventing the program from downloading and that I should click it to change that, and when clicked presents a menu with the option to download the program (how is this any different to the previous promise of a download?), which when clicked brings up a box asking if I want to save the program or run it, so I click run and when it's downloaded I get a warning saying that programs can do stuff to the computer, do I want to run it? I click run again (how is this any different to the previous promise of running the program?) and Windows pops up a message saying that the program is doing stuff, do I want to allow it to continue? I press continue an FINALLY get the the "first step" of the installer.

On Debian I could give a similar example that I can't get the Gdebi package installer to work, which means that I have to save packages and install them with the command "dpkg -i package_filename.deb", which can result in a broken setup if the newly installed package depends on other stuff, which means I need to install the stuff to fix it with "apt-get -f install" and press "y" to confirm it. This may seem annoying, but I know that if I wanted to fix it badly enough then I could, and would even be encouraged to do so (afterall, Gdebi works perfectly well in Ubuntu).

Whenever my wireless card messes up on Debian, on the other hand, I get incredibly frustrated and annoyed, and often need to walk away from my laptop and have a break, since I feel completely powerless over it. The wireless firmware I use is proprietary, since Broadcom don't tell anyone the language that their wifi chips speak (although clean-room reverse engineering of a Free Software replacement in Italy seems to be showing some promise), so even though I'm running completely Free Software applications on a Free Software kernel of Free Software drivers (in my case Linux), and can look at the code at any time to see what it's doing and possibly fix any problems, when it comes to my wireless card the disconnects are seemingly random, as I have no way of inspecting the firmware since it is proprietary. I therefore feel helpless to stop it disconnecting, and can't remedy the situation in any way other than disabling the Wifi, unloading the driver, reloading the driver, enabling the Wifi and trying to reconnect. If that doesn't work then all I can do is to try it again. In fact, I've even written a little script which does all of that whenever I run "restart-wireless". It's so bad that the developers of NetworkManager, the (currently) best network control system on Linux, do the same thing. If network manager's running and I get disconnected then I see the wireless network icon disappear and the wifi LED turn off. After a few seconds the Wifi LED comes back on, the Wifi icon comes back and it tries to connect. If it doesn't work then it happens again. It's depressing.

So there's one reason I think computing is in the sorry state that it is, people are being conditioned to think that "computers crash" (which conveniently keeps the cost of quality control down), that they aren't "using them properly" (which conveniently keeps the costs of having good designers down) and that they're destined to always be "clueless with everything computer-related" (which conveniently keeps people upgrading stuff they don't need to on the advice of the 'experts' selling the upgrades). This was caused by the proprietary software world, since with Free Software the volunteers, users, developers, companies and organisations which make and sell it actively encourage all users to "hop the partition" and 'scratch their own itches', since it results in less work and more Free software for those doing the encouraging. Whether it was intentional or not is debatable (never assign to malice that which can be explained by (in?)competance).

This unfortunately means that people like my Mum have some kind of internal off switch which is activated by the word "computer", so that when things like the broadband packages they are paying for are discussed with a sentence like "This one has a limit on how much we can do per month, so they'll charge more if we go over it, but this one doesn't" are met with a response such as "Well you know I don't understand these things" (which is the exact same sentence used for every attempt at explaining something, no matter how basic). It makes me *REALLY* frustrated when people don't bother to apply mentals skills which even five year olds possess, simply because they know computers are involved. Discuss the exact same thing with phone contracts, or even the price of meat per kilo, and they'll readily discuss the merits of each option, and even go into the small print, but with computers they've learned to be helpless, and thus think they have no control over anything related, and feel much more comfortable being extorted by monthly bills twice the size of what they could have, where the value calculations are worked out by someone else, than they do with having to confront some computer-related thinking for a few minutes.

Another big cause of computer-helplessness is a genuine problem with computing today, Free Software or not. Empirical evidence does say that just the presence of control, whether or not it is used, is the important bit (like my access to the source code for everything I use), but it's still a chore to actually make use of that control.

As an example, a few years ago the Nautilus file manager changed so that icons got bounding boxes. This meant that before the change if I clicked in a transparent corner of a circular icon then nothing would get selected, but after the change the circular icon would be selected because I'd clicked within the bounding box. This is a good thing usability-wise, but I was rather annoyed with the way it interfered with my specific setup. I had cut out images and assigned them as icons to the various folders in my Home folder, stretched them rather large and arranged them manually so that they filled the Nautilus window without overlapping, so that clicking the visible parts would select the icon, whilst clicking on a transparent part would 'fall through' and select one visible below. I was very proud of this, and it had taken quite a while to do. Then, after an update, all of the icons got bounding boxes and thus clicks in transparent areas no longer fell through, making selecting and double-clicking things unusable. I had to make all of the icons small again, and arrange them in a grid, destroying the previous awesomeness. I took it upon myself a few months ago to bring back the no-bounding-box Nautilus as a well-buried option, so I got the source code to the most recent version of Nautilus and looked through the version control history to find out when the change was made which added the bounding boxes (I think this is where it changed http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/nautilus?view=revision&revision=9123 ) and replaced that section in the latest code with the old code, and it worked. However, this took a few days, since I've done very little C programming and never used GObject with C before, and I didn't even have to write any code (it was just copypasta). If I want to fix every bug I find it would take an intractable amount of time, even though I can fix any bug I want to individually.

There looks to be some promising stuff going on to rectify this at the Viewpoints Research Institute, an organisation funded by the US government with awesome Computer Scientists like Alan Kay. One of their aims is to "reinvent" computing, which basically involves making (yet another) computer system, but one which is as understandable (and hence small) as possible. They're aiming for a complete, working system in under 20,000 lines of code (for comparison, Windows has around 40,000,000), and have got some nice tools like their "Combined Object Lambda Architecture" programming system, which aims to be written in itself and be able to compile down as far as FPGAs (ie. rewiring the microchips themselves to represent the program), and OMeta which allows very compact and easy to understand programming language implementations (for example they have an almost-complete (missing "try"/"catch" and "with") Javascript interpreter which is only 177 lines of code), which, like their COLA, is written in itself. This allows COLA-based implementations of other languages to make their system, with new languages so easy to define that each part can be made in a tailor-made language, even being redefined in places where it makes things more comprehensible.

Hopefully having more understandable and approachable code will mean it is easier to find and fix bugs, so that nobody has to experience them for long. It might also help to reduce the number of people who teach themselves to be helpless at computing, although as for the ones who are already learned-helpless it will take a lot of effort on their part to break out of it, which won't be helped by proprietary companies trying to dress up their shit code as some kind of magical snake oil which cannot be obtained from anywhere else, or be written by mere mortals (which GNU set out to disprove with UNIX and has done a pretty fine job), and the media displaying binary all over the place whenever the internals of computers is mentioned.

OK, I think I should carry on revising now, as I've gone off on a bit of a rant, but damn it my blog's still not boring or crap! :P

Wanna Be A Programmer?

Computers are all around us, and our lives are to a large extent controlled by them. Your bank balance, your phone calls, your email, messaging and Web browsing, games, wages and bills, music, video, literature and image production, trains, planes and cars, it's all controlled by computers.

Software is the stuff which controls computers, and therefore our lives. So who controls the software? Well, if you deal with proprietary software then it's usually controlled by some foreign corporation trying to wring money out of you. If you deal with Free Software then the control is still in the hands of the developers, however YOU can choose the developers. If you don't like what the original developers are doing then you have every right to fork the software and get some other developers to work on it and take it in the direction you want. Often this involves paying the developers a wage, but there is also another option: YOU can develop it yourself! The only skill you need is computer programming, which is a skill that can even be picked up by young children, as long as they have some exposure to it.

So how can YOU learn to program? Well if you're a complete beginner I would follow these steps:

1) Forget EVERYTHING you think you know about programming.

It's most likely bollocks, perpetuated by the media's obsession with stereotypes and putting flashing, unintelligible crap all over any computer monitor that appears on screen, and the proprietary software companys' desire to look like the crap they serve is somehow magical and unequalled. It's not. Programming is easy. It has to be, because computers are so unfathomably stupid. Just because Turner is able to create beautiful seascapes doesn't mean that a two year old can't scribble with a crayon, in the same way that simple programs are easy despite huge ones being hard.

2) Learn to think like a programmer.

2.1)

A nice way to get the hang of this is to play games like this one (NOTE: You may need to install SWFDec to play that). Light Bot features a very simple programming language to control a robot, it is easy to use since each command is an icon and the program (called "main method") is a grid which you drop the icons into then press Go (the program runs like English text, ie. starting at the top left and going across, then going down a row starting at the left and so on). The nice part about it is that the program can only be a maximum of 12 commands long, which is not enough to complete some levels, but there are two functions (reusable blocks of code) available to make repetitive things take less space.

2.2)

After you've completed that game a few times (there are 12 levels) you can go on to Guido van Robot (this may be in your package manager already), which is very similar to the Light Bot game but uses typed commands rather than movable icons, allowing you to make much longer programs. Even without Light Bot's restricted space it is still important to use functions like you've learned, as they are the best way to make large programs more manageble and less confusing. Transitioning from Light Bot to Guido van Robot is an important skill, since it makes sure you know the principles of programming (commands, functions, repetition, etc.) and how to use them, rather than just learning one specific programming language.

2.3)

After you've mastered Guido van Robot and can comfortably tackle any problem without difficulty or confusion, it's time to move on to something a bit less rigid in structure, like the old favourite Logo (there are a number of different Logo programs out there, you can try XLogo and UCBLogo). Logo is a programming language in its own right, but is often used with the "turtle" graphics system, a very similar concept to controlling the Light Bot and Guido van Robot (it can actually be used to control a real robot, but I'm assuming you don't have one :P ). The turtle can be moved to any pixel on the screen by giving it commands like FORWARD, RIGHT 90, and so on, plus it can draw a trail as it goes, allowing you to draw images. Taking advantage of the incredible speed of modern hardware you can make animations, by drawing lines, erasing them, then drawing them again in a slightly different way. Give yourself some problems to tackle, such as drawing a circle, making a function which can draw a circle to a given size (this uses the concept of "arguments"), drawing a spiral (this uses the concept of "recursion"), a stick man, an animation of a bouncing ball, making the ball squish slightly when it bounces, a windmill with turning sails and a growing vine. All of those are possible with a little thought, but *remember to use functions* and leave yourself *a lot* of comments throughout your code to remind yourself wha each bit does. When you can make those given examples without much thought you've mastered a lot of the art of programming. Well done :D

2.4)

There are many books out there which can help you learn to program. For instance How to Think Like A Computer Scientist. Googling for guides and tutorials on your language of choice is usually helpful too.

3) Learn one powerful programming language

Logo is a nice little language, but your programs can't really talk to anything else. This requires software called "libraries", and for libraries which are not written in your language of choice you will need a "binding" to access them. I don't know of ANY libraries which are written in Logo, or any bindings to let Logo access libraries written in other languages. This means you'll have to move on to something more powerful :( Since you now know Logo, which is a simplified form of the LISP language, it would be sensible to learn another simple, LISP-like language. I would recommend Scheme, which is a very powerful type of LISP, without a lot of the unneeded crap which exists in LISP. Guile is a very good Free Software Scheme system, which has bindings for many libraries, therefore I recommend your next step is to dive in and learn Scheme using Guile. It is very similar to Logo, except that every command is enclosed in brackets. If you want to make real graphical applications, there are bindings for the Gnome desktop, and even the new Clutter 3D graphics library. Now that you know Scheme you can do anything. Although some things are harder than others...

4) Learn the Object Oriented paradigm

In the same way that functions are an INCREDIBLY useful tool to make programs short, readable, understandable and maintainable, there are a few different progamming 'paradigms'; ways to structure and think about your programs and how they work, which will make your life easier and avoid getting headaches.

The first paradigm you used was "procedural programming", where the code describes the procedure to follow, "do this, then do that", but there are many more, some of which you've touched on. "Object Oriented" programming (OOP) takes functions one step further and groups them together into so-called 'objects'. To run a function you must ask the object which contains it. Objects have a type (a "class"), which can be a subclass of another class. For example "dog" might be a subclass of "animal", so that every function which "animal" can do ("breathe", "eat", etc.) a "dog" can do implicitly. Every object, for instance "Lassie", is an 'instance' of its class, for instance "Dog". Objects can also implement different roles (called "interfaces"), like "Lassie" can implement "Entertainer" and "Pet" (since not all "dogs" are "entertainers" or "pets"). By dividing a problem up into the different classes and objects it involves, the program becomes as simple as describing how they interact (eg. "lassie.fetch(big_stick)"). Learning the Object Oriented paradigm will make your life a LOT easier when you start to make large programs, but it is not very easy to do on your own.

5) EXPERIMENT!

If you have an idea or a question, try it out and see what happens! You can ONLY learn through experimenting and playing, there just isn't another way to do it.

6) Learn more languages

Scheme isn't the only kid on the block. There are many other languages you may like to learn. Good choices would be Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Vala and, if you're feeling masochistic, C, C++ and Java. The more languages you learn, the more approaches you learn to tackle problems with and the more you learn about why certain languages do things in certain ways (and therefore how to use them more efficiently). What may be hard in one language may be easy in another, so having a substantial set of knowledge is always a good thing.

7) Contribute to Free Software!

It might seem a daunting prospect to make your own Web browser, file manager or music player, but there are already many such projects out there with the code fully available for you to download and play with. Every Free Software project welcomes new developers, even if you're just fixing a bug which really annoys you. If you contribute to a widely-used piece of software like Firefox or Gedit then your changes, if approved by the maintainers, will be used by millions of people worldwide. If your changes aren't approved, but you would still like to make them available, you can keep them in a distributed version control system like Git or Bzr, letting you cherry-pick the upstream changes you want, and keep any changes you make yourself, and also let other people get your modified version.

Most importantly, don't be scared by all of the complicated stuff you see computers doing every day. Computers don't get harder and harder to program over time, they get easier and easier, since all of that fancy stuff has *already been written*! You might not understand how an image gets from the hard drive to the screen, but you don't need to know or care (I don't!), other people have already written libraries to do that. You just have to say something like "display(my_photo.jpeg)" and voila!

With computers becoming more and more integral to our way of life, I encourage everyone to at least attempt following some of those steps, if only to realise that computers aren't unknowable, magic things; they're understandable, controllable and most importantly they are changable. Posessing an attitude (like my Mum) of "I don't understand these things" is retarded. I didn't know how to piss standing up until I tried it.

Awesomeness

This is awesomeness. Since when did Bravo broadcast anything important?