Seth’s blog

Or by our blogs. Here are old photographs of New York, some from a hundred years ago.

In the journal In Character, Simon Baron-Cohen, the autism expert, writes:

Clinicians describe the deep, narrow interests in autism as “obsessions,” but a more positive description might be “areas of expertise.” Sometimes the area of expertise a person with autism focuses on appears not to be very useful (e.g., geometric shapes, or the texture of different woods). Sometimes the area of expertise is slightly more useful, though of limited interest to others (e.g., train timetables, or flags of the world). But sometimes the area of expertise can make a real social contribution (such as fixing machines, or solving mathematical problems, or debugging computer software).

My guess is that in autism, something is turned off that should be turned on. This allows the rest — in particular, the rest of what motivates  us — to be seen more clearly.  Everyone has a tendency toward expertise, says my theory of human evolution. Why everyone? Because everyone suffers from procrastination and the tendency toward expertise is the tendency that causes procrastination: It’s harder to do something new than to do what you did yesterday. Back in the Stone Age, this tendency toward expertise caused different people to do different hobbies, and become good at them. This was the beginning of occupational specialization.

The most popular TV show is American Idol. On Survivor, one of the most popular TV shows, an “immunity idol” has a big role. Next: a restaurant chain called Potlatch.

How will Al Gore respond to this, I wonder?

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade . . . All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930.

Thanks to Geoffrey Kidd.

More. A response to this article. Thanks to Kathy Wollard.

I’ve always wondered what makes a job satisfying. Yeah, it varies from person to person. What about features that are true for everyone? What about this, for example?

For a while at Amazon, I was the Manager of Website Performance and Availability. . . . Whenever something went wrong, and some chunk of the site got slow, I tracked down why and got people to fix it. Each week I wrote a report summarizing everything that went wrong in excruciating detail, and presented it to a room of directors and VPs in a weekly metrics meeting. It was as sisyphean a task as any you can possibly imagine. In a software system as large, complex and constantly changing as amazon.com, something is always going wrong. . . . My job was to make a list of irritating things each week, and I was widely regarded as having done it as well as anyone ever had. . . .I found this job to be the most soul-crushing work I’ve ever done. I totally burned out in a year, as did the person who held the job before me.

I tell you this story as a cautionary tale. Try to find work that allows you to focus on positive things. Avoid like the plague any work that focuses on negative things.

Related research. The writing cure.