Help real people, not imaginary ones

As most of you know, I've just helped a large part of my family survive the death of a granddaughter, and now I'm taking care of Melody through repeated, difficult hip surgeries. Through all of this, there is a principle I live by:

Help real people, not imaginary ones.

That is, find out what people are really experiencing, feeling and needing, and help with that, not my own or someone else's guess about what they are experiencing and needing.

It's natural to imagine yourself in the other person's place. But that only provides a first guess, not "ground truth" as they say in the military. Other people are not me. So I do not assume other people need or want exactly what I would need or want if I were in their place. I have to pay attention and find out.

Then there are third-party guesses. I don't want to get tangled up in a web of other people's guesses about what's needed. Other people might know something useful, but, again, that's not ground truth either.

Two small examples: Melody wants more privacy that some people do. She actually does not want someone sitting with her 24 hours a day in the hospital. If she did, I'd be doing it, but she doesn't, so I'm not, and it's not because I don't care or am not available. Similarly, we do not need meals delivered to our house, despite people eager to cook for us; Melody wasn't our cook in the first place, and we're not at home to eat them.

All of this leads to another principle I live by:

Guesses have to be tested against reality.

That is (to borrow a term from electronics) there has to be a feedback loop. In fact, I wonder how much human relations can learn from the mathematics of the control of machines. Guesses are never perfect, and there has to be a feedback loop to correct errors. If the feedback loop is disconnected or is tied to some other inaccurate estimate, rather than the actual output, the system veers off to an extreme. I could be describing either an op-amp or a human activity when I say that.

In fact, there is one very simple way to break the feedback loop when dealing with human beings: Assume that people don't mean what they say (or expect others to assume that you don't mean what you say). Anybody who plays such a game invites chaos, in the mathematical sense of the word.

Permanent link to this entry

Deceptive use of AI is wrong

I don't mind making a medical appointment by talking on the telephone to a speech-understanding system, as long as it works well enough.

But when it introduces itself as Barbara, has humanlike hesitations in the speech, and has fake office noises in the background, then it's not helping me. It's deceiving me.

Why do they think customers will enjoy being deceived? Let's let machines be machines.

Permanent link to this entry

Personal updates

[Updated.]

As I was saying at the end of July, Melody was admitted to St. Mary's Hospital (Athens, Ga.) on July 28 and had an operation to clean out her artificial hip and replace some parts the next day. She has been there, bedridden, ever since, making a slow recovery that has necessitated transfusions, strong antibiotics, and a lot of medical monitoring. Physical therapy has consisted of getting her up on a walker briefly each day and into a chair. She is indeed getting better, very slowly.

At some point she will be transferred to the rehabilitation unit in the same hospital for extensive physical therapy combined with continuing medical monitoring. We expect then to have to give her IV antibiotics at home for several weeks.

I have been visiting her at length every day and not writing Notebook entries. My disconcerting experience this evening was sorting our laundry, and finding that not even one piece of it was hers.

Permanent link to this entry