Jeff Atwood Serves up a Great Post

Thankyou Jeff Atwood! In your blog post entitled “Email: The Variable Reinforcement Machine,” you clearly explain a fundamental cognitive-emotional mechanism (see “Variable Reinforcement”) that moves people to excessively attend to email. While not surprising, I still smiled when I saw comment after comment from people who, even after reading your entry, were moved to defend the use of email! I wonder at how so many people refuse to consider, even for a moment, how they are subject to forces beyond their immediate perception. Even when such is put before them as clearly as you have done!

Ken’s Return

Variable reinforcement comes in two flavors - Variable Interval Reinforcement and Variable Ratio Reinforcement.

Variable ratio (VR) reinforcement delivers reinforcement after a random number of responses (based upon a predetermined average)
Variable interval (VI) reinforcement delivers reinforcement for the first response after a random average length of time passes since the last reinforcement

Variable ratio reinforcement conditions one to act much more quickly than Fixed Ratio, Variable Interval, or Fixed Interval. Makes sense since of the four, it is the condition under which one is most likely to attribute some control over the outcome!

Moving away from systems in which one responds to some stimulus (”You Have Mail!”) with reward seeking behavior will over time tend to reduce such behavior.

Is Twitter Better than Email?

Kathy Sierra thinks that like Email, Twitter presents a variable reinforcement problem. Given the variety of circumstances under which people utilize email and twitter, it is unlikely that any comparison of one to the other will yield a heuristic that will settle the question “Is Twitter better than email?” Even when limited to considering only variable reinforcement.

My sense is that the problem has been defined too narrowly, and rather than providing part of the answer, Twitter just alleviates a symptom of the actual problem.